Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.

This was published in the New Yorker, and there was some discussion about it when PARC posted something on their blog responding to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548325

An interesting letter was printed in a subsequent issue: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627m... whose author wrote a longer blog post about this: http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk...

I find that whole story a bit poignant, especially given that the MIT Scratch app (Smalltalk based programming for kids) was not allowed into the iPad app store.

>"Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company's next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley."

Actually, it was the Lisa.

And it was a failure.

As for it's fame, apparently Mr. Gladwell has never heard of it.

Malcom Gladwell talking about innovation? No thanks! This is the same dude who thinks Intellectual Ventures is an innovation machine.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...

Gladwell does a tremendous job of cherry picking bits of information to form a compelling narrative. I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest.

I was driving by a Xerox site the other day with my 15-year-old nephew and he asked, "What's "Xerox?" (He didn't even know how to pronounce properly). He'd never even heard the word "xerox" used as a verb for photocopying, even.

Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it.

In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products.

I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad).

And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox).

Xerox fermented ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly.

My apologies for rambling.

If you have the chance, you may want to read the book «Dealers of Lightning», which explains the whole story of Xerox PARC. The laser printer, Smalltalk, the ethernet, text processing, the GUI, the Alto, the Bravo, the first laptop etc. Everything is very well explained in a quite entertaining style.

IMO, a must read for every computer engineer, after all it tells the story of almost everything computers are about today :)

http://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&dq=isbn:08...

I enjoyed this article. However at the end, he states that the reason Bach created many works of genius is that he wrote so much music that statistically some of it was bound to be great.

I feel this is a deeply flawed claim. First, I would like to see a list of the works by Bach which are not staggering works of genius. What percentage of his output is not in this category? Is it 0% or something ever so slightly more?

Compare this to my friend who sends me CDs of his latest compositions. He produces several of these each year and all are uniformly poor. He is very prolific yet the odds don't seem to be helping.

I would assert that raw talent is key, not producing tons of output and hoping for the best.

This line really stuck out to me, adding a hint of perspective in a world where A/B testing and the like are par for the course:

"Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn't on a metric."

I shouldn't need to say this, but this in no way should be read to indicate that such metrics and testing are not helpful; they're just not everything.

Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it.

In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products.

I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad).

And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox).

Xerox had ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly.

My apologies for rambling.

Some points on the article:

The GUI was a combination of inventions and innovations, some of which pre-dated xerox and some of which were added by Apple.

The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done.

I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI" isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc.

"To this day, nothing sticks more deeply into he craw of Lisa and Macintosh designers than the suggestion that all their interface work simply consisted of making a copy of the work they saw at PARC[2]. This is simply not true. A look at the revolutionary design of the Lisa interface shows that much more was involved. Xerox never seriously intended to go to market. Apple was primarily in the business of selling personal computers and could not afford such a luxury. Apple had to design an interface intended for use by millions of people. It had to be intuitive and robust. The Lisa team built the Lisa OS from the ground up with the intention of making it friendlier to novice users. The Lisa's engineers realized that the PARC's ideas had to be stripped down and rebuilt to more demanding specifications[2]."

From: http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html