Can Xerox's PARC find new life with SRI?

A large part of the money that was funned into research at Xerox came from the government itself in the form of tax breaks and other benefits. So it was not a big sacrifice for Xerox to maintain that lab. If they had to change course was due to government policy becoming less interested in industrial innovation and more focused on offshoring and financial gains for the last decades.

You mean like google and ML and Attention is All You Need...

Or let's look at what a group of people with brains and money went on to do: the PayPal mafia. Would they not be the modern day version of att/unix(a product of anti trust)->Berkley/Unix->and the foundation of the valley (sun, most databases)...

If anything, Xerox's "willingness" (intentional or not) to allow the root ideas to grow in various places has been a blessing to the IT industry as a whole.

What you are suggesting is they could, or should, have become all the companies you listed. But that would gave been both impossible, and counter productive.

Steve jobs saw the GUI, and Ethernet, and object orientated programming, and laser printers, and office software, and yet Mac is famous for just the GUI. Others would run with networking, programming, MS with office and do on.

And in addition to those major players there were lots of others competing too.

So no I don't think Xerox management needs to be embarrassed. They saw the value printing and ran with that. They left others to develop the other ideas. And in the long run we are much richer for that.

So, from me anyway, there's no shame on them, rather a tip of the hat, and a nod to the vision they had to create PARC in the first place. They are the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Dead wrong. Laser printers alone were a $2B a year business. Printers, especially big ones, were right in their wheelhouse.

If you want to argue it could have been so much more wealth, you're right.

Also once you start framing it as investment or a biz decision in a big public company, the natural question is whether it's the best use of capital for Apple. It's not really about short vs longterm thinking either, it's about the deployment with the highest likelihood to return on any timeframe.

I apologize if I come off as bitter, but as someone who got into research because I was inspired by reading about people like Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, and many other researchers from the previous generation, it’s a shame what science has become, but it’s a reflection of our society where the worth of persons and individuals is quantified in terms of money, and where anything that’s not perceived as making money is denigrated (such as the liberal arts).

Unfortunately the lesson industry learned from Xerox PARC is that research needs to be more tightly controlled by the company instead of the company’s direction being influenced by the research coming out of the lab, and thus industrial research labs, at least in computing, have undergone a transformation where it’s about near-term progress in areas that are closely tied to business strategy. I’ve worked in industrial research settings for much of the past decade and have seen the last vestiges of more free research die out. I can’t think of a company that was run to the ground by its research division, and even if such examples exist, this is an indictment on management for allowing research expenditures to sink the company, not research.

Of course not all companies can afford the types of labs that Xerox and AT&T had when those labs were in their golden ages. However, I believe that the shift toward research driven toward short- and medium-term business needs, as well as academia’s focus on fundraising and publications, has effectively snuffed out unfettered research, where the only people in a position to pursue research that way are grad students with appropriate advisors and funding situations, tenured professors who are willing to take risks, and those working outside the system such as independent researchers. Where’s the next big thing going to come from if businesses are worried about the next quarter’s results and if academia has effectively abandoned freedom of inquiry in a quest for more money and prestige?

Obviously less of an issue if well paid, but well paid academia is kind of a contradiction.

https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/What-Really-Happened-Steve-...