Excellent Excellent Article! An absolute storm of Creativity where each Genius exponentially builds off of another. The Energy, Enthusiasm and Drive of these G

Excellent Excellent Article! An absolute storm of Creativity where each Genius exponentially builds off of another. The Energy, Enthusiasm and Drive of these Geniuses leaps out at you. Bur as usual A bunch of horse’s asses who don’t know anything about technology were making the decision (direct quote) and squandered it all. Would it be possible to recreate a similar environment in any company today? I highly doubt it. Nobody looks at Research as it was done in Xerox PARC, Bell Labs and HP Labs. Some relevant quotes; Some researchers say PARC was a product of the 1960s and that decade’s philosophy of power to the people, of improving the quality of life. When the center opened in 1970, it was unlike other major industrial research laboratories; its work wasn’t tied, even loosely, to its corporate parent’s current product lines. And unlike university research laboratories, PARC had one unifying vision: it would develop “the architecture of information.” Since projects were not assigned from above, the researchers formed their own groups; support for a project depended on how many people its instigator could get to work on it. “Systems research requires building systems,” he said. “Otherwise you don’t know whether the ideas you have are any good, or how difficult they are to implement. Since MAXC, the center has built prototypes of dozens of hardware and software systems—prototypes that sometimes numbered in the thousands of units. “There was a lab where the Altos were getting built, with circuit boards lying around, and anyone could go in and work on them,” recalled Daniel H.H. Ingalls, If you’re dealing with marketing or planning people, make them kick the tires. All the charts and all the slides aren’t worth a damn One reason that Xerox had such trouble bringing PARC’s advances to market was that, until 1976, there was no development organization to take research prototypes from PARC and turn them into products. “The amazing thing about the PARC environment in 1976-77 was the feeling of power; all of a sudden you could create things and make lots of them. Not just one sheet, but whole books,” said Conway. But some of those who left PARC recalled that a disillusionment had set in. They hadn’t been frustrated with the progression of their careers; rather, they had been frustrated with the rate of progression of their products into the real world.