4 ms·

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.

129 points by boh 15y ago

iqster 15y ago
Malcom Gladwell talking about innovation? No thanks! This is the same dude who thinks Intellectual Ventures is an innovation machine. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  Indeed. He is the king of anecdata such that "Gladwelling" has become a word (roughly meaning to construct a pretense of argument from a series of anecdotes). Plus there's this (ab)use of his name: http://cyclingprof.blogspot.com/2010/04/gladwelled.html http://cyclingprof.blogspot.com/2010/04/gladwelled.html
- kenjackson 15y ago
  If you read the article it's hard not to believe that IV is an innovation machine. Hatred of SW patents aside their talent and ideas are pretty cool.
  - william42 15y ago
    Which just makes it even more tragic that such bright people are working for the king of patent trolls.
    - noonespecial 15y ago
      Its damn near meta-tragic. Bright people thinking up things that they are going to actively prevent from being invented.
spacemanaki 15y ago
This was published in the New Yorker, and there was some discussion about it when PARC posted something on their blog responding to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548325 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548325 An interesting letter was printed in a subsequent issue: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627mama_mail3 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627m... whose author wrote a longer blog post about this: http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk.html http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk... I find that whole story a bit poignant, especially given that the MIT Scratch app (Smalltalk based programming for kids) was not allowed into the iPad app store.
brudgers 15y ago
>"Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company's next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley." Actually, it was the Lisa. And it was a failure. As for it's fame, apparently Mr. Gladwell has never heard of it.
- protomyth 15y ago
  His phrasing does imply that the first product with GUI from Apple was the Macintosh and as you said, it was a failure. There were actually 3 (Lisa, Macintosh, Apple IIGS). Lord knows I don't want to defend Mr. Gladwell, but Jobs really didn't have much influence on the Lisa and it could actually be viewed as a competing product with the Macintosh.
  - nirvana 15y ago
    Jobs is the one that negotiated the Lisa team's visit to Xerox's labs. Here's an article on the development of the Lisa you might be interested in reading: http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html
    - protomyth 15y ago
      Yes, he got the visits, but he wasn't the leader or even a primary influencer of the Lisa team.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nirvana 15y ago
Some points on the article: The GUI was a combination of inventions and innovations, some of which pre-dated xerox and some of which were added by Apple. The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done. I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI" isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc. "To this day, nothing sticks more deeply into he craw of Lisa and Macintosh designers than the suggestion that all their interface work simply consisted of making a copy of the work they saw at PARC[2]. This is simply not true. A look at the revolutionary design of the Lisa interface shows that much more was involved. Xerox never seriously intended to go to market. Apple was primarily in the business of selling personal computers and could not afford such a luxury. Apple had to design an interface intended for use by millions of people. It had to be intuitive and robust. The Lisa team built the Lisa OS from the ground up with the intention of making it friendlier to novice users. The Lisa's engineers realized that the PARC's ideas had to be stripped down and rebuilt to more demanding specifications[2]." From: http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html
- yesbabyyes 15y ago
  "The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done." From the article: Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would "open its kimono."
- VladRussian 15y ago
  http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt&characters=Bill http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... Gates&sortOrder=Sort by Date "You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!" But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Krylez 15y ago
Gladwell does a tremendous job of cherry picking bits of information to form a compelling narrative. I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest.
- Anechoic 15y ago
  > I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest. Such as...?
  - spacemanaki 15y ago
    I've posted about Gladwell's critics before, I hope you forgive me linking an older comment, but I don't want to just repeat myself. edit This is a link to the whole thread because it's worth reading for other discussion on Gladwell. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758542 I generally find him entertaining but always take anything I read by him with a grain of salt.
    - technomancy 15y ago
      It would be more interesting/relevant to hear if you had any specific beef with the particular article on PARC rather than rummaging up unrelated complaints.
      - spacemanaki 15y ago
        I agree that I wasn't really being fair to Gladwell. I posted this comment to support Krylez's more general assertion about Gladwell's style. But I'll come out and say what I hinted at elsewhere in this thread: I really wish Gladwell had bothered to tie together the threads between PARC, Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Objective-C, the iPad, the Scratch app being banned and Apple's vision of app-store-based-computing. It seems to me that he really missed out on a exactly the kind of cherry-picking and narrative forming he's good at, and in this case I think there might be a pretty interesting story buried in there. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the history to know if there really is, and it's likely it wouldn't have really worked in the New Yorker.
ragweed 15y ago
I was driving by a Xerox site the other day with my 15-year-old nephew and he asked, "What's "Xerox?" (He didn't even know how to pronounce properly). He'd never even heard the word "xerox" used as a verb for photocopying, even.
superchink 15y ago
This line really stuck out to me, adding a hint of perspective in a world where A/B testing and the like are par for the course: "Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn't on a metric." I shouldn't need to say this, but this in no way should be read to indicate that such metrics and testing are not helpful; they're just not everything.
- thirdhaf 15y ago
  Weren't spreadsheets, a la VisiCalc the killer business app for the Apple II? On a more serious note I'm a true believer in RISK capital. Once your company is actually profitable it seems like a great idea to ensure that you do a bit of R&D in-house. Worst case scenario you get a nice blurb somewhere about keeping corporate research alive, best case you invent something ridiculously cool.
podperson 15y ago
Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it. In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products. I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad). And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox). Xerox had ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly. My apologies for rambling.
podperson 15y ago
Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it. In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products. I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad). And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox). Xerox fermented ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly. My apologies for rambling.
droithomme 15y ago
I enjoyed this article. However at the end, he states that the reason Bach created many works of genius is that he wrote so much music that statistically some of it was bound to be great. I feel this is a deeply flawed claim. First, I would like to see a list of the works by Bach which are not staggering works of genius. What percentage of his output is not in this category? Is it 0% or something ever so slightly more? Compare this to my friend who sends me CDs of his latest compositions. He produces several of these each year and all are uniformly poor. He is very prolific yet the odds don't seem to be helping. I would assert that raw talent is key, not producing tons of output and hoping for the best.
bromagosa 15y ago
If you have the chance, you may want to read the book «Dealers of Lightning», which explains the whole story of Xerox PARC. The laser printer, Smalltalk, the ethernet, text processing, the GUI, the Alto, the Bravo, the first laptop etc. Everything is very well explained in a quite entertaining style. IMO, a must read for every computer engineer, after all it tells the story of almost everything computers are about today :) http://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&dq=isbn:0887309895&ei=DNOCTvSuH8fiUO2IrOUH&hl=ca http://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&dq=isbn:08...

129 points by boh 15y ago

Malcom Gladwell talking about innovation? No thanks! This is the same dude who thinks Intellectual Ventures is an innovation machine. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...

jamesbritt 15y ago
Indeed. He is the king of anecdata such that "Gladwelling" has become a word (roughly meaning to construct a pretense of argument from a series of anecdotes). Plus there's this (ab)use of his name: http://cyclingprof.blogspot.com/2010/04/gladwelled.html http://cyclingprof.blogspot.com/2010/04/gladwelled.html
kenjackson 15y ago
If you read the article it's hard not to believe that IV is an innovation machine. Hatred of SW patents aside their talent and ideas are pretty cool.
- william42 15y ago
  Which just makes it even more tragic that such bright people are working for the king of patent trolls.
  - noonespecial 15y ago
    Its damn near meta-tragic. Bright people thinking up things that they are going to actively prevent from being invented.

spacemanaki 15y ago

This was published in the New Yorker, and there was some discussion about it when PARC posted something on their blog responding to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548325 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548325 An interesting letter was printed in a subsequent issue: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627mama_mail3 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627m... whose author wrote a longer blog post about this: http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk.html http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk... I find that whole story a bit poignant, especially given that the MIT Scratch app (Smalltalk based programming for kids) was not allowed into the iPad app store.

brudgers 15y ago

>"Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company's next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley." Actually, it was the Lisa. And it was a failure. As for it's fame, apparently Mr. Gladwell has never heard of it.

protomyth 15y ago
His phrasing does imply that the first product with GUI from Apple was the Macintosh and as you said, it was a failure. There were actually 3 (Lisa, Macintosh, Apple IIGS). Lord knows I don't want to defend Mr. Gladwell, but Jobs really didn't have much influence on the Lisa and it could actually be viewed as a competing product with the Macintosh.
- nirvana 15y ago
  Jobs is the one that negotiated the Lisa team's visit to Xerox's labs. Here's an article on the development of the Lisa you might be interested in reading: http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Yes, he got the visits, but he wasn't the leader or even a primary influencer of the Lisa team.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nirvana 15y ago

Some points on the article: The GUI was a combination of inventions and innovations, some of which pre-dated xerox and some of which were added by Apple. The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done. I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI" isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc. "To this day, nothing sticks more deeply into he craw of Lisa and Macintosh designers than the suggestion that all their interface work simply consisted of making a copy of the work they saw at PARC[2]. This is simply not true. A look at the revolutionary design of the Lisa interface shows that much more was involved. Xerox never seriously intended to go to market. Apple was primarily in the business of selling personal computers and could not afford such a luxury. Apple had to design an interface intended for use by millions of people. It had to be intuitive and robust. The Lisa team built the Lisa OS from the ground up with the intention of making it friendlier to novice users. The Lisa's engineers realized that the PARC's ideas had to be stripped down and rebuilt to more demanding specifications[2]." From: http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html

yesbabyyes 15y ago
"The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done." From the article: Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would "open its kimono."
VladRussian 15y ago
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt&characters=Bill http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... Gates&sortOrder=Sort by Date "You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!" But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

Krylez 15y ago

Gladwell does a tremendous job of cherry picking bits of information to form a compelling narrative. I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest.

Anechoic 15y ago
> I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest. Such as...?
- spacemanaki 15y ago
  I've posted about Gladwell's critics before, I hope you forgive me linking an older comment, but I don't want to just repeat myself. edit This is a link to the whole thread because it's worth reading for other discussion on Gladwell. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758542 I generally find him entertaining but always take anything I read by him with a grain of salt.
  - technomancy 15y ago
    It would be more interesting/relevant to hear if you had any specific beef with the particular article on PARC rather than rummaging up unrelated complaints.
    - spacemanaki 15y ago
      I agree that I wasn't really being fair to Gladwell. I posted this comment to support Krylez's more general assertion about Gladwell's style. But I'll come out and say what I hinted at elsewhere in this thread: I really wish Gladwell had bothered to tie together the threads between PARC, Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Objective-C, the iPad, the Scratch app being banned and Apple's vision of app-store-based-computing. It seems to me that he really missed out on a exactly the kind of cherry-picking and narrative forming he's good at, and in this case I think there might be a pretty interesting story buried in there. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the history to know if there really is, and it's likely it wouldn't have really worked in the New Yorker.

ragweed 15y ago

I was driving by a Xerox site the other day with my 15-year-old nephew and he asked, "What's "Xerox?" (He didn't even know how to pronounce properly). He'd never even heard the word "xerox" used as a verb for photocopying, even.

superchink 15y ago

This line really stuck out to me, adding a hint of perspective in a world where A/B testing and the like are par for the course: "Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn't on a metric." I shouldn't need to say this, but this in no way should be read to indicate that such metrics and testing are not helpful; they're just not everything.

thirdhaf 15y ago
Weren't spreadsheets, a la VisiCalc the killer business app for the Apple II? On a more serious note I'm a true believer in RISK capital. Once your company is actually profitable it seems like a great idea to ensure that you do a bit of R&D in-house. Worst case scenario you get a nice blurb somewhere about keeping corporate research alive, best case you invent something ridiculously cool.

podperson 15y ago

Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it. In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products. I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad). And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox). Xerox had ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly. My apologies for rambling.

podperson 15y ago

Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it. In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products. I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad). And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox). Xerox fermented ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly. My apologies for rambling.

droithomme 15y ago

I enjoyed this article. However at the end, he states that the reason Bach created many works of genius is that he wrote so much music that statistically some of it was bound to be great. I feel this is a deeply flawed claim. First, I would like to see a list of the works by Bach which are not staggering works of genius. What percentage of his output is not in this category? Is it 0% or something ever so slightly more? Compare this to my friend who sends me CDs of his latest compositions. He produces several of these each year and all are uniformly poor. He is very prolific yet the odds don't seem to be helping. I would assert that raw talent is key, not producing tons of output and hoping for the best.

bromagosa 15y ago

If you have the chance, you may want to read the book «Dealers of Lightning», which explains the whole story of Xerox PARC. The laser printer, Smalltalk, the ethernet, text processing, the GUI, the Alto, the Bravo, the first laptop etc. Everything is very well explained in a quite entertaining style. IMO, a must read for every computer engineer, after all it tells the story of almost everything computers are about today :) http://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&dq=isbn:0887309895&ei=DNOCTvSuH8fiUO2IrOUH&hl=ca http://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&dq=isbn:08...