The Comeback of Xerox PARC | Hacker News Reader

The Comeback of Xerox PARC

technologyreview.com

46 pointsvdondeti11 comments

«The mouse, the graphical user interface, and the drop-down menu were all born at PARC—but it was Apple and Microsoft that commercialized them and made them cornerstone inventions of the PC industry.»

The mouse was never invented at PARC! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

It seems the ball mouse was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse#Mechanical_mice

I was thinking Yesterday that it would be nice for HP to return to being the kind of company Steve Wozniak wanted to work for, or others from that era to form or reignite a similarly desirable company. This is good news, I hope to see more of it.

> it would be nice for HP to return to being the kind of company Steve Wozniak wanted to work for

The soul of that company became Agilent when HP/Agilent split a decade ago.

After companies get to be a certain size it gets tougher and tougher to do basic research. Part ofbitbia corporate culture part is fear of undermining existing products.

The examples where this isn't true (lockheed Martin's skunkworks, Apple) are very rate. More common are large companies shifting from innovation to services (IBM an GE).

This makes sense. Will one company necessarily know how to commercialize a technology? This is one reason the Angel and VC models work. They separate the innovation from big company politics, and create an enviroent where killing old products is encouraged.

GE may play in the services game, but I see them as fairly innovative in a niche of complex systems engineering with real hardware in a way that few of the larger companies quite sustain - their jet engines, and wind turbines to name a couple areas.

I would argue the exact opposite: larger companies tend to have enough resources floating around to be able to perform research. e.g. Bell Labs, PARC, Watson, BBN...

VCs have their place, but they fund ideas with shorter runways. It's the opposite model to research.

They have the resources to invest, but struggle to commercialize. This is why so many of Xerox's great inventions were commercialized elsewhere. Even when they have success stories (ibm's first PCs) they are usually hives off from the rest of the firm.

Smaller firms lack development dollars but have more flexibility in finding a market niche. For early stage innovation, being small also can force simplicity.

This observation about technical innovation being only half the work in getting new technologies to market is something you could say about universities: my belief is that university research only goes about half the way necessary to get new ideas into the commercial world. Academics start companies to partly address that problem but mostly these operate in very specialized spaces; the academics get rich but the wider world sees little benefit. What if universities did what PARC is doing now?

That kind of "academics" is done at Microsoft Research et al. If your focus is "papers", you will very often only do the first part as you mention.

I hope this will mean cheap printed rfid tags for us!

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