Chuck Geschke, Father of Desktop Publishing, Dies at 81

nytimes.com

16 points·nanna··7 comments

Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26849131 (210 points/42 comments)

List of things Xerox majorly screwed up; not selling the PC, the mouse, the PDF. What else did those Woody headed executives let slip through their fingers?

In their defense history focuses on the false negative rate without considering the false positive rate at the same time. Large corporate R&D labs churn out amazing and bizarre things all the time. A lot of these ideas are garbage and it’s a subtle challenge to see which jankedy prototypes are actually world changing.

Timing also matters. For example, the mouse wasn't very interesting until GUIs became truly widespread.

Also routes to market. Xerox basically did not sell to consumers. Doing so would have involved a major business model shift.

Ripeness of ideas and problems is important; frequently it's hard to tell if they are ripe or not. Attack a problem a decade early and you might be GO, a decade later and you might be Apple.

A minor bit from the article:

“The company’s most influential creation was a version of PostScript for the internet age: the Portable Document Format, or PDF, which remains a vital way of sending and printing documents from almost any machine on the internet.”

Semantics, but I’d argue Photoshop is the most influential creation. It is the verb people use to describe the digital alteration of images.

To go past the paywall, open developer tools -> network tab -> first item in the list -> preview tab for a neat reading experience.

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