But when I do give Jobs his due credit, it is as a designer and entrepreneur. Xerox had developed much of what we think of coming from Apple, but what did they do with it? Their management kept it closed up, and chose not to bring many technologies to market. Jobs saw the potential, and took the entrepreneurial risk. The result is that on the day of his death, Xerox is a 101B market cap company, and an also ran in technology. Apple is a 350B market cap company, most of which comes from Jobs, and still blazing a trail in technology.
Its a shame Jobs did not work for Xerox. The future would have happened at least ten years earlier.
RIP
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.
Doubt it. Xerox's immune system would have rejected the foreign organism fiercely. The more effective he was, the more intense would have been the rejection.
That's one reason capitalism is superior to socialism. With socialism, the state is Xerox, and it's the only game in town. With capitalism, you go find Woz and start a company!
I politely disagree. Steve's genius was not just his ability to be a visionary, but also his ability to actually get it done. To get something done requires a mix of personal traits (e.g. for one having the vision, an ability to have strong self-drive, inate passion, etc) as well as environmental conditions (e.g. be at the right place at the right time, at a place that lets you do what you need to do when you need to do). I doubt Xerox would have been the right place. The very fact that Xerox, in terms of development, had come up with a whole host of really advanced/applicable technology that it sat on, means that it was a bureaucratic amalgmation of stick-in-the-butt bean-counting leading to a state of corporate doldrums where good (nay, even great) ideas may exist, and a lot of very passionate inventive workers present, but with an upper-management crust that simply doesn't want to step in 'that' direction.
A person like Jobs requires either his own gig, or to work for a company that no only recognizes talent but lets that talent flourish and find its own way. That is generally not to be found in large 'older' companies where most workers basically have to produce widgets (with a widget in this case being whatever they are tasked with in the job description, be it an actual piece of machinery, a cup of hot chocolate, lines of advanced software, or teaching a child). They are only expected to perform excellently in what they are told to do (with some variance given here and there for 'innovativeness'), but they are not encouraged to truly think outside the box.
It reminds me of a friend of mine who became the Managing Director of a financial company (investment bank) at the age of 26 when the prior MD unfortunately passed away. This guy is extremely bright, but I always say the biggest advantage he has is that he got to the position when he was very young and without a lot of experience (extreme smarts he has, and he has great exposure to various product mixes, but he has not worked for decades in 'proper' investment banking). Why is that an advantage? Simply because he does not know what is 'supposed' to work and what is 'supposed' to 'not' work, and thus he tries to do things that more experienced people would tell him is folly, and because he actually attempts to do it it ends up working (because the 'experienced' people were silly sots whose experience was a hindrance). Thus, this (now) 27 year old is making the 'wise heads' moan and groan in despair as he unleashes new products and services (as well as new ways of doing old things) while they sit around in their boardrooms having meetings for the umpteenth time. Now, imagine if my friend worked for them? He would come up with a great idea, and promptly be shot down (with valid reasons on why it would 'not' work). Sooner or later he would settle to becoming 'simply' a very effective investment banker rather than someone who is changing investment banking at a regional level.
I fear the same would have happened had Jobs worked for Xerox. He would definitely have still been a visionary, but he would not have had the vehicle to do it. His hunger would have been impeded by a corporation that is already making sufficient profits as to not need (and not risk) to go into 'new areas,' which is a frustration I have personally seen myself in an old job I used to do (which went to such a point that I left a year and half ago, and those same ideas they were saying were impossible are the same ones I am making them get diarrhea over).
Xerox would have killed Jobs' soul.