No, it would not have happened 10 years earlier.
The guys who created PostScript worked at ‘rox. They offered it to Xerox. Xerox management couldn’t see the point, since they already had InterPress.
So they went off and started Adobe.
There were networking pioneers at Xerox. They offered to ramp up ideas about Ethernet and local area networking - which at that time was only 3 Mbps - and Xerox management turned them down. Off they went to start 3Com.
I could go on and on and on and on. By the time I showed up in Silly Valley in 1991, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Xerox had completely bungled any hopes of capitalizing on their incredible technology developments from the late 70’s and early 80’s. It popular to hear among the PC fans that “Apple stole X” from Xerox and so on, but these same PC bigots also failed to NB that Xerox had “stolen” the idea of the mouse from SRI. Apple licensed the mouse from SRI, Xerox didn’t. The mouse as a GUI input device was patented in 1970 or thereabouts - well before the pioneering work in GUI’s was happening at ‘rox.
My first job out of school was in Rochester, NY and I worked with a bunch of former Xerox EE’s. They had very little nice to say about the management of Xerox. I later learned that the management of Xerox had moved their HQ down to Stamford, CT - because they didn’t like being in the gritty, industrial area where Xerox was built up in Rochester. These senior management idiots were very comfortable in Stamford and living the lives we’d later come to associate with hedge fund managers who now infest the area - fully 20 years before the first hedgies made it out there.
Into this corporate environment, Xerox brought forth PARC. PARC was filled with incredible talent, that produced amazing ideas. Most of what you see on your screen today or in your computer today has been influenced by PARC’s work. But in case after case, in everything from local area networks, to time servers, to file servers, print servers, (most all of client/server computing in fact), workstations with GUI’s, bit-mapped displays, Ethernet hardware addressing, the idea of a OUI in ethernet addresses, laser printers, scanners, page description languages... you name it, Xerox PARC invented it all.
And their corporate management in Stamford, CT let it all slip away. Why? Because they were fat, dumb and happy on the huge cash flow they had from a near-monopoly in copying technology in the worldwide business markets. Their cash flows were HUGELY fat and happy.
Their CEO in the 70’s and early 80’s were everything you’d expect out of an exec of GM - very lush offices, dabbling in Democratic politics, funding a thick layer of advertising on NPR and PBS, you name it. Oh, very posh indeed.
Why would they want to bother with any of those unwashed rabble out on the left coast?
Xerox deserved to get left behind. Their senior management was worse than incompetent, they were brain-dead, just like GM’s management has been for decades. Everyone played by the rules according to Hoyle and Xerox still controlled all the technology they invented, we’d still be waiting for it to be delivered to the market, and the state of the art in personal computing would look a lot more like DOS or RSX-11 on PDP-11’s than what we have today.
Excellent post. Good read.
And what if you replaced that management with Steve Jobs at Xerox? What if Xerox acted on the vision? That was the question I was posing. The difference between Xerox today and Apple today is Steve Jobs.
The Canadian navy invented the mouse in 1952.