This is certainly selective memory, or uninformed memory. I worked at PARC, and worked on Bayou, and it is certainly not true to say that PARC "does not produce any products."
There are two sides to PARC: short-term, focused research that interacts with Xerox business units, and longer term, more "academic" research that is, often, not directly related to current Xerox business interests.
People often neglect the latter in the talk of "Xerox never made money from PARC." Xerox has actually made quite a bit of money from direct PARC inventions. A lot of what PARC does is central to Xerox's core business--the work on blue lasers, the materials science behind toner chemistry, etc. PARC is agressive in patenting and protecting intellectual property. All of these things turn into money for Xerox.
But other projects--Bayou among them--are further afield. And you're unfairly characterizing PARC if you think that Bayou is all that's come out of this category of research recently. PARC is (1) incredibly dynamic, and (2) incredibly diverse. Fundamental research at PARC covers nanotechnology, cryptography, distributed systems, human computer interaction, lasers, robotics, and so on. You may have only heard of Bayou, but I'd say that Bayou would only be considered a moderatly sucessful PARC project; many other projects have gone far beyond Bayou in terms of impact.
It's disappointing to see that so many of the articles here post half-true truths about PARC in the 1970's, or else--through ignorance or misinformation--make it sound as if PARC has been dormant since then. PARC's great strenth (still!) is that it involved people from not only computer science (which is what most folks on/. think when they think of PARC) but also electrical engineering, materials science, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, etc...and a robust artist in residence program!
Slashdot Mirror
There are two sides to PARC: short-term, focused research that interacts with Xerox business units, and longer term, more "academic" research that is, often, not directly related to current Xerox business interests.
People often neglect the latter in the talk of "Xerox never made money from PARC." Xerox has actually made quite a bit of money from direct PARC inventions. A lot of what PARC does is central to Xerox's core business--the work on blue lasers, the materials science behind toner chemistry, etc. PARC is agressive in patenting and protecting intellectual property. All of these things turn into money for Xerox.
But other projects--Bayou among them--are further afield. And you're unfairly characterizing PARC if you think that Bayou is all that's come out of this category of research recently. PARC is (1) incredibly dynamic, and (2) incredibly diverse. Fundamental research at PARC covers nanotechnology, cryptography, distributed systems, human computer interaction, lasers, robotics, and so on. You may have only heard of Bayou, but I'd say that Bayou would only be considered a moderatly sucessful PARC project; many other projects have gone far beyond Bayou in terms of impact.
It's disappointing to see that so many of the articles here post half-true truths about PARC in the 1970's, or else--through ignorance or misinformation--make it sound as if PARC has been dormant since then. PARC's great strenth (still!) is that it involved people from not only computer science (which is what most folks on /. think when they think of PARC) but also electrical engineering, materials science, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, etc...and a robust artist in residence program!