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> Absentee leadership with no understanding or care to monetize it Its not that. Its that pushing digital photography and other stuff and monetizing them would

> Absentee leadership with no understanding or care to monetize it Its not that. Its that pushing digital photography and other stuff and monetizing them would kill their existing business. However you look at it, its a risk.

midoridensha 4y ago
Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I feel like it should have been fairly obvious that computers were the future, and their existing business (photocopiers) wasn't exactly going to die, but it was going to become less important as digital documents because normal. We still have photocopiers today, after all, though now they're integrated with digital printers and scanners: people still use paper documents, just in different ways than merely copying them. Someone more far-sighted should have seen this, and seen the value of their PARC work. Obviously, someone there at Xerox did, or else why did PARC exist in the first place? So somehow, they managed to have the vision to enable spending tons of money on this research center and the brilliant minds there, but then the higher-ups were too stupid to actually do anything with all that research. It really doesn't make sense to me.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > Someone more far-sighted should have seen this, and seen the value of their PARC work Even if someone sees that and is somehow able to sell it to the board, that would also need to be sold to the shareholders. And there comes the real challenge. Its not easy to go to shareholders and say that you are going to start a new product line that will kill the profits of another, but ask the shareholders to trust you, because this is going to be the 'thing' of the future. On one side billions of dollars of investments in stocks, backed by a gigantic market held by a flagship product. On the other side predictions of future. The investors and even the markets wouldnt like that. In a sense, capitalism hampers innovation by providing the wrong incentives.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    That's why evolving new company and retiring old company is important. Japan is bad for this.

midoridensha 4y ago

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I feel like it should have been fairly obvious that computers were the future, and their existing business (photocopiers) wasn't exactly going to die, but it was going to become less important as digital documents because normal. We still have photocopiers today, after all, though now they're integrated with digital printers and scanners: people still use paper documents, just in different ways than merely copying them. Someone more far-sighted should have seen this, and seen the value of their PARC work. Obviously, someone there at Xerox did, or else why did PARC exist in the first place? So somehow, they managed to have the vision to enable spending tons of money on this research center and the brilliant minds there, but then the higher-ups were too stupid to actually do anything with all that research. It really doesn't make sense to me.

unity1001 4y ago
> Someone more far-sighted should have seen this, and seen the value of their PARC work Even if someone sees that and is somehow able to sell it to the board, that would also need to be sold to the shareholders. And there comes the real challenge. Its not easy to go to shareholders and say that you are going to start a new product line that will kill the profits of another, but ask the shareholders to trust you, because this is going to be the 'thing' of the future. On one side billions of dollars of investments in stocks, backed by a gigantic market held by a flagship product. On the other side predictions of future. The investors and even the markets wouldnt like that. In a sense, capitalism hampers innovation by providing the wrong incentives.
- fomine3 4y ago
  That's why evolving new company and retiring old company is important. Japan is bad for this.