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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Many people (myself included) would compare X in intent and setup to PARC from the 1970s. The latter managed the extraordinary feat of pushing out a major innovation on average about once every 2.5 years from 1970 to 2000. That's things like laser printing, OOP, Ethernet, etc. that went on to build industries or take existing ones in new directions.

X, on the other hand, has been around for over 6 years now and as far as I know, its only marginal success to date has been Glass. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that X's success rate so far has been lower than many people expected.

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I dunno, given the public backlash, far from kickstarting a new industry, Glass killed face-mounted wearables stone dead. The word "glasshole" will probably stick around for longer, so there's that...

It may be true that it's harder now to make those kinds of leaps than it was in the 1970s though.

Why?

I mean, everything is obvious in retrospect. I'm sure there were some PARC guys bemoaning that all the fundamental discoveries were already made in the 1950s... Google today probably has bigger budgets than Xerox had then (tho' that's just a guess on my part)

A lot of discoveries get exponentially harder. Compare the LHC to experiments people were doing 100 years ago for an extreme example.

Evidence of this assertion?

It's a speculation, not an assertion. But it's a speculation many well-informed scientists have made in the last few years.

For example: http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/02/07/the-difficulty-...

The fruits might be hanging higher nowadays though.

> Many people (myself included) would compare X in intent and setup to PARC from the 1970s.

That was probably true originally. Lately, (especially post-Alphabet) it seems like the pressure is on them to produce commercial products, albeit ones that might be many years out - my impression is that researchers at PARC were not, realistically, under the same pressure (see: the many innovations that were never commercialized).

That makes sense, though - Google is actively in search of new business models, while Xerox enjoyed such enormous market share while PARC was well-funded that I doubt they felt that kind of pressure until later.

PARC may have pushed out innovative tech every 2.5 years but didn't it take much longer for most of those technologies to change the shape of or come to be foundational to tech?

Their biggest success is probably Google Brain.

Google brain was an acquisition, not a Google X project.

Google Brain was an internal development, while Google DeepMind was an acquisition. What the conceptual difference is supposed to be between the two is hard to say.

Yes you're right. How confusing!

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