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As a researcher, it would be wonderful if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI (like how most industrial research labs

As a researcher, it would be wonderful if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI (like how most industrial research labs sadly demand) and also avoids the “publish or perish” pressures of academia. Rather, my ideal lab would be dedicated to providing an environment that enables researchers to pursue ambitious visions that will change computing. Xerox PARC would easily return to its former glory if it returned to its style under Bob Taylor in the 1970s. In fact, it would be quite fitting if Alan Kay gets tapped to run the lab. While there’s a need for more directed short-term research, I feel that industry has largely moved away from more free, longer-term, “pure” research, and I also feel that academic research has become affected by “publish or perish” and fundraising demands. There seems to be no room these days for researchers who want to do more exploratory work, short of becoming independently wealthy or relegating such exploration to nights and weekends.

rented_mule 3y ago
I would love to see the glory days of pure research groups like PARC and Bell Labs return. But, so many business folks are aware of how Xerox was embarrassed by PARC that it's unlikely that approach will be tried again anytime soon. When I speak of embarrassment here, it's not about the incredible innovation that came out of PARC, but about Xerox management's handling of that innovation. Billions and billions (trillions?) of dollars in value was created (e.g., Adobe, 3Com, SGI→NVIDIA, Mac / Windows, laser printers, ethernet, etc.) based on their research, but ~0% of that value went to Xerox. From a business point of view, it was a disaster. And business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded at this level. If I'm an executive who's not sure if I, or my organization, will be able to tell the great ideas from the duds, why spend money that might expose that?
- coliveira 3y ago
  > business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded A large part of the money that was funned into research at Xerox came from the government itself in the form of tax breaks and other benefits. So it was not a big sacrifice for Xerox to maintain that lab. If they had to change course was due to government policy becoming less interested in industrial innovation and more focused on offshoring and financial gains for the last decades.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    > A large part of the money that was funned [sic] into research at Xerox came from the government itself Do you have any support for that? For example, Xerox's financial disclosure forms should still be available. Because I think it's wrong. The government funded academic projects, not commercial ones.
    - coliveira 3y ago
      You don't need to look so far away: tax breaks for R&D are still a thing, in the 70s and 80s they were even more important for these giant companies. Government contracts were also a big income source for Xerox, AT&T, IBM, and others. Moreover, research labs were basically a method for companies to move discoveries from publicly funded Universities into private hands. They naturally benefited from receiving graduates and discoveries that started on publicly funded research institutions.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        In other words: no, you don't have any support.
        coliveira 3y ago
        I have no obligation of doing research for you.
        AlbertCory 3y ago
        You're the one making the extravagant claims, not me. like >Government contracts were also a big income source for Xerox, AT&T, IBM, and others. Don't get offended if you get challenged on that. I don't think you actually know anything specific here.
        coliveira 3y ago
        You're making a fool of yourself. There is nothing extravagant about saying government gives money for industrial labs. Here are a few that you are lazy enough not to see: High Taxes Brought Us Xerox PARC and Bell Labs [1] PARC, a Xerox company, today announced it has secured funding from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency [2] NTIA grants Verizon, AT&T-led open RAN group $42M [3] Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and others partner with US government on AI research [4] Governor Hochul announced a $10 billion partnership with the semiconductor industry such as IBM [5] [1] https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-brought-to-you-by-high-taxes.html https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20231211024425/https://www.parc.com/web/20231211024425/https://www.parc.com/press-releases/parc-secures-arpa-e-funding-to-build-energy-saving-travel-preferences-attractive-to-individual-travelers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231211024425/https://www.parc.... [3] https://www.mobileworldlive.com/old_latest-stories/ntia-grants-verizon-att-led-open-ran-group-42m/ https://www.mobileworldlive.com/old_latest-stories/ntia-gran... [4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-google-and-others-partner-with-us-government-on-ai-research-program-160111850.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-google-and-o... [5] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-10-billion-partnership-bring-next-generation-research-and https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-1...
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  >>> When I speak of embarrassment here, it's not about the incredible innovation that came out of PARC, but about Xerox management's handling of that innovation. You mean like google and ML and Attention is All You Need... Or let's look at what a group of people with brains and money went on to do: the PayPal mafia. Would they not be the modern day version of att/unix(a product of anti trust)->Berkley/Unix->and the foundation of the valley (sun, most databases)...
- bruce511 3y ago
  Between laser printers and photo copiers (built on laser printer tech) Xerox did just fine. If anything, Xerox's "willingness" (intentional or not) to allow the root ideas to grow in various places has been a blessing to the IT industry as a whole. What you are suggesting is they could, or should, have become all the companies you listed. But that would gave been both impossible, and counter productive. Steve jobs saw the GUI, and Ethernet, and object orientated programming, and laser printers, and office software, and yet Mac is famous for just the GUI. Others would run with networking, programming, MS with office and do on. And in addition to those major players there were lots of others competing too. So no I don't think Xerox management needs to be embarrassed. They saw the value printing and ran with that. They left others to develop the other ideas. And in the long run we are much richer for that. So, from me anyway, there's no shame on them, rather a tip of the hat, and a nod to the vision they had to create PARC in the first place. They are the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - musicale 3y ago
    > Steve jobs saw the GUI, and Ethernet, and object orientated programming, and laser printers, and office software, and yet Mac is famous for just the GUI. Others would run with networking, programming, MS with office and do on. In the 1980s Apple adopted/commercialized: GUI -> Lisa (later Mac) Desktop LAN -> AppleTalk (NBP lookup eventually influenced mDNS) OOP -> Object Pascal (still exists in Delphi/Lazarus); arguably HyperTalk (messages/events/handlers) Laser Printers -> LaserWriter Office Software -> Lisa Office System; MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint And of course Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint debuted on the Mac. But your point is well taken - PARC alumni (and ideas) did not only land at Apple; for example, most of us have probably used Ethernet, Microsoft Word, PDF (derived from PostScript), etc.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      Oh, I agree, Apple did ultimately make use of those technologies. They built on those ideas, but the again so did lots of others. I'm not suggesting Apple didn't (ultimately) embrace those technologies, but rather that they weren't the "driving force" behind them. Whereas you could say Apple was the "driving force" of the GUI. Microsoft would go on to drive Office software. There were word processors, and spreadsheets before Office, but Office integrated all those tools together and became the gold standard. Adobe would drive desktop publishing, PDF and so on. Sooo much of today's world is built on PARC, SRI, Bell Labs, and a couple others. It was an explosion of development and research seldom seen in any field outside times of war.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > From a business point of view, it was a disaster. Dead wrong. Laser printers alone were a $2B a year business. Printers, especially big ones, were right in their wheelhouse. If you want to argue it could have been so much more wealth, you're right.
  - Affric 3y ago
    I think they’re referring to PARC specifically. Not Xerox as a whole
    - DaniFong 3y ago
      Laser printers were invented at PARC, the physicists were a whole other element of what was going on there, beyond the computer work
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Starkweather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Starkweather
  - rented_mule 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm a bit jaded here. You're right that they made a ton of money, but left a lot of great work to fester, even in laser printing. My perspective comes working in Xerox engineering on high volume printers in the early 1990s. PARC folks repeatedly came through with great ideas about how to make the printers faster and cheaper (at the same time). My favorite demo they gave us was replacing the PDP-11 inside the printer, which was becoming increasingly expensive, with a Sun SPARCstation. They had done all the work to do a full demo on the prototype printer we were working on. Everything was much faster and it provided a lot more features. Plus development printer software could be developed in C or other languages, not just assembly. They were effectively told "that looks nice" and sent back to Palo Alto. That was hard to watch.
    - dhosek 3y ago
- bitwize 3y ago
  According to Kay, Xerox made more on the royalties for the laser printer alone than it cost to run the lab -- over 200 times more. They made a killing on PARC tech, just not as much as they could have if they were helmed by someone like Jobs or Gates.
- wbl 3y ago
  If you're not sure you can do it, why would you be doing that job?
- axus 3y ago
  Wouldn't the lesson learned be to invest in the cool ideas and companies that are generated, and avoid the mistakes of the past?
sydbarrett74 3y ago
As brilliant as Kay is, I'd be hesitant to put an 83 year-old as an active leader. I could see him in an emeritus/advisory role, however.
- jdougan 3y ago
  If he has any advantage, it would be that he paid attention to what made PARC work well at the time, and what working well actually feels like, and might be able to do something similar. OTOH, you're right, he could be ossified. The problem with an advisory role is no one has to listen to him, no matter how sensible he is.
mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
There should be a balance though, an open ended research lab that is a non-profit and generates ideas is going to have a tough time getting funding. Maybe this research lab should partner with something like YC so when an idea is nearing a production quality design, VC's can fund it to product fruition with some sort of royalty agreement with the research lab to fund more ideas. I would think a lot of highly technical, actual scientists (not some dude who's been hacking at CRUD web apps for a couple decades, aka me) would love to work at a place where constant academia/VC pressure is set aside to allow more pure research to happen.
UncleOxidant 3y ago
Bell Labs could do this because their parent company was a government sanctioned monopoly that didn't have to worry about about mundane problems like quarterly earnings. Xerox had the copier machine market pretty well to itself for a good 20 years which enabled them to fund PARC (sure, there were some competitors in that time, but they weren't taking a huge bite out of Xerox's profits yet). I think Apple could've done this a few years back when they had something like $100B cash on hand - they could have established a research foundation and provided it with funding that would've lasted for long enough for it to become self sustaining. Maybe Apple still could do this as they've got $73B cash on hand. $10B would go a long ways towards establishing an institution like this. Even better if other FAANG companies joined by providing seed funding, but maybe that looks too anti-competitive these days? (the incentive for providing initial funding could be a stipulation that funding companies get a break on IP license fees) Of course, as someone else mentions in this thread, this institution should learn from PARC's mistakes and do a better job of licensing their IP in order to keep operating for a longer term. I suspect we really need something like this. Bell Labs (and PARC) gave our economy a technological boost that it wouldn't have had without them. Maybe a revitalized SRI (with some additional outside funding) could become what you're talking about?
- akozak 3y ago
  Figuring out the right amount of endowment is quite difficult, but you certainly need a LOT to get the outcomes like PARC. Are you running it off interest or burning down the pot? Also possible that we are simply in a different techno-economic and scientific moment than those researchers were (ie it was cheaper for them). Also once you start framing it as investment or a biz decision in a big public company, the natural question is whether it's the best use of capital for Apple. It's not really about short vs longterm thinking either, it's about the deployment with the highest likelihood to return on any timeframe.
  - UncleOxidant 3y ago
    > Are you running it off interest or burning down the pot? At some point in the future there should be some IP that could be licensed. If you're starting out with, say, a $10B endowment there should be investments that could sustain a certain level of operation for quite a long time until that IP license income kicks in. Towards the end of the article they talk about the land that PARC is situated on and how that's now very valuable and will provide a source of income for the new SRI/PARC - so they seem to have lucked out with a real estate investment that they didn't realize at the time would payoff later.
trhway 3y ago
>if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI wasn't for example OpenAI exactly that? The difference from the old times here seems to be that any advances are easily monetized today due to gigantic VC available, and thus the immediate ROI demand immediately arises from inside - from the employees, from the CEO down to lowest rank-and-file, who see the immediate potential to turn the advance into billions on the spot. Imagine if Alan Key and his colleagues could turn their inventions into billions in the next few months after making those inventions - I doubt they would have let Jobs to take the tour and practically steal the IP.
- linguae 3y ago
  You brought up something very interesting that I wish more people emphasized when discussing PARC. Alan Kay and his colleagues were not indifferent to business, far from it. In fact, they actively tried to get Xerox to commercialize their technologies. Many of them got frustrated and either joined other companies (Alan Kay went to Atari before going to Apple, Larry Tesler joined Apple before Alan Kay did, Charles Simonyi went to Microsoft and took Bravo with him, which helped lead to Microsoft Word) or started their own (Adele Goldberg started PARCPlace to commercialize Smalltalk).
foobiekr 3y ago
One of the underappreciated reasons both Bell Labs and PARC worked was they actually hired a lot of people who had already established themselves. One of the problem with young researchers, no matter how nobly minded, is that they will play the game. A PARC today would have almost no chance to avoid becoming a trend following mess. This is part of how they avoided the ROI catastrophe (researchers with enough cred could argue that there was a long term potential) and the publish or perish issues.
- Solvency 3y ago
  If that's the case and if older developers are always complaining/citing ageism or leetcode startups getting them down, why don't they band together to propose an R&D lab?
  - linguae 3y ago
    1. Development and research are two different skills. Not all developers are good researchers, and not all researchers are good developers. With that said, there are people who are good at both; Dennis Ritchie and Jeff Dean are great examples. 2. The biggest barrier to starting a research lab is how will this lab make enough revenue to fund the lab’s operations and the living expenses of its staff? A significant challenge of running a research institute is fundraising. The first thing a lab must do is to establish a mission. Will this lab do long-term, speculative work or will it aim for shorter-term surer bets? What are the lab’s boundaries; what stipulations from funders can it live with, and what ones are unacceptable? I say this because as a researcher, I have learned The Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Another way of putting it: “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” It is often the case that money comes with strings attached; it’s up to the lab to determine which strings are acceptable or not.
  - foobiekr 3y ago
    Because the current operating mode for almost all companies is a focus on shorter and shorter term results? Because while there is a place for some hands on developers at such a place that is not most of the staff? The Manhattan project hired a lot of engineers but none of them were the design leads.
bmitc 3y ago
I just don't think it's possible in a capitalist society and today's economic climate. Everything and everyone is chasing the bottom dollar and squeezing out any coin they can from products. I have heard Microsoft Research, someone that can afford an actual long term research center, even has more pressure to publish than academia.
- linguae 3y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. We live in a world where the value of everything must be justified on a regular basis. The fundamental challenge with research is that it’s inherently risky, yet research institutions are expected to demonstrate “impact” (a.k.a. papers, patents, and $$$) on a regular basis in order to stay funded. This pressure is passed down from the shareholders and executives to middle management (or, in an academic context, the administration and tenured faculty evaluating non-tenured faculty and staff), who then passes it on to the researchers. I apologize if I come off as bitter, but as someone who got into research because I was inspired by reading about people like Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, and many other researchers from the previous generation, it’s a shame what science has become, but it’s a reflection of our society where the worth of persons and individuals is quantified in terms of money, and where anything that’s not perceived as making money is denigrated (such as the liberal arts).
  - bmitc 3y ago
    You don't sound bitter. This is reality, and people have to shape their lives and thus wants, needs, dreams around this brutal reality and collection of constraints.
- nextos 3y ago
  Over-reliance on metrics leads to fragile organizations.
ulfw 3y ago
Alan Kay is 83. Why would you want him to run a lab that requires lots of administrative work?
JustLurking2022 3y ago
The environment you describe is self-destructive, which is why it is rare throughout history. Xerox PARC did it, and reaped almost none of the rewards for their innovation, so it perished. It only worked for Bell Labs because they had monopolistic control of telephony and could charge whatever they liked to subsidize their R&D. As soon as they lost the monopoly, it went down hill fast. Google is the closest thing to this in the past couple decades, and have seen all their investments in AI walk out the door to found competitors. Bottom line, pouring enormous amounts of money into pure research without demanding commercialization results certainly benefits researchers (who can pick up and take their research elsewhere) but runs companies into the ground.
- linguae 3y ago
  The problem with this analysis is that Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg did make efforts within Xerox to commercialize Smalltalk and related technologies. When Xerox fumbled, they went elsewhere: Alan Kay to Atari and then Apple, and Adele Goldberg founded PARCPlace. A similar story is the founding of Adobe by ex-Xerox PARC people; PostScript is the result of frustrations with Xerox’s strategy for Interpress. It wasn’t that the researchers were indifferent to or even hostile to commercialization; it’s that Xerox’s management fumbled repeatedly when it came to commercializing PARC’s research. Unfortunately the lesson industry learned from Xerox PARC is that research needs to be more tightly controlled by the company instead of the company’s direction being influenced by the research coming out of the lab, and thus industrial research labs, at least in computing, have undergone a transformation where it’s about near-term progress in areas that are closely tied to business strategy. I’ve worked in industrial research settings for much of the past decade and have seen the last vestiges of more free research die out. I can’t think of a company that was run to the ground by its research division, and even if such examples exist, this is an indictment on management for allowing research expenditures to sink the company, not research. Of course not all companies can afford the types of labs that Xerox and AT&T had when those labs were in their golden ages. However, I believe that the shift toward research driven toward short- and medium-term business needs, as well as academia’s focus on fundraising and publications, has effectively snuffed out unfettered research, where the only people in a position to pursue research that way are grad students with appropriate advisors and funding situations, tenured professors who are willing to take risks, and those working outside the system such as independent researchers. Where’s the next big thing going to come from if businesses are worried about the next quarter’s results and if academia has effectively abandoned freedom of inquiry in a quest for more money and prestige?

rented_mule 3y ago

I would love to see the glory days of pure research groups like PARC and Bell Labs return. But, so many business folks are aware of how Xerox was embarrassed by PARC that it's unlikely that approach will be tried again anytime soon. When I speak of embarrassment here, it's not about the incredible innovation that came out of PARC, but about Xerox management's handling of that innovation. Billions and billions (trillions?) of dollars in value was created (e.g., Adobe, 3Com, SGI→NVIDIA, Mac / Windows, laser printers, ethernet, etc.) based on their research, but ~0% of that value went to Xerox. From a business point of view, it was a disaster. And business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded at this level. If I'm an executive who's not sure if I, or my organization, will be able to tell the great ideas from the duds, why spend money that might expose that?

coliveira 3y ago
> business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded A large part of the money that was funned into research at Xerox came from the government itself in the form of tax breaks and other benefits. So it was not a big sacrifice for Xerox to maintain that lab. If they had to change course was due to government policy becoming less interested in industrial innovation and more focused on offshoring and financial gains for the last decades.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > A large part of the money that was funned [sic] into research at Xerox came from the government itself Do you have any support for that? For example, Xerox's financial disclosure forms should still be available. Because I think it's wrong. The government funded academic projects, not commercial ones.
  - coliveira 3y ago
    You don't need to look so far away: tax breaks for R&D are still a thing, in the 70s and 80s they were even more important for these giant companies. Government contracts were also a big income source for Xerox, AT&T, IBM, and others. Moreover, research labs were basically a method for companies to move discoveries from publicly funded Universities into private hands. They naturally benefited from receiving graduates and discoveries that started on publicly funded research institutions.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      In other words: no, you don't have any support.
      - coliveira 3y ago
        I have no obligation of doing research for you.
        AlbertCory 3y ago
        You're the one making the extravagant claims, not me. like >Government contracts were also a big income source for Xerox, AT&T, IBM, and others. Don't get offended if you get challenged on that. I don't think you actually know anything specific here.
        coliveira 3y ago
        You're making a fool of yourself. There is nothing extravagant about saying government gives money for industrial labs. Here are a few that you are lazy enough not to see: High Taxes Brought Us Xerox PARC and Bell Labs [1] PARC, a Xerox company, today announced it has secured funding from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency [2] NTIA grants Verizon, AT&T-led open RAN group $42M [3] Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and others partner with US government on AI research [4] Governor Hochul announced a $10 billion partnership with the semiconductor industry such as IBM [5] [1] https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-brought-to-you-by-high-taxes.html https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20231211024425/https://www.parc.com/web/20231211024425/https://www.parc.com/press-releases/parc-secures-arpa-e-funding-to-build-energy-saving-travel-preferences-attractive-to-individual-travelers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231211024425/https://www.parc.... [3] https://www.mobileworldlive.com/old_latest-stories/ntia-grants-verizon-att-led-open-ran-group-42m/ https://www.mobileworldlive.com/old_latest-stories/ntia-gran... [4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-google-and-others-partner-with-us-government-on-ai-research-program-160111850.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-google-and-o... [5] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-10-billion-partnership-bring-next-generation-research-and https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-1...
zer00eyz 3y ago
>>> When I speak of embarrassment here, it's not about the incredible innovation that came out of PARC, but about Xerox management's handling of that innovation. You mean like google and ML and Attention is All You Need... Or let's look at what a group of people with brains and money went on to do: the PayPal mafia. Would they not be the modern day version of att/unix(a product of anti trust)->Berkley/Unix->and the foundation of the valley (sun, most databases)...
bruce511 3y ago
Between laser printers and photo copiers (built on laser printer tech) Xerox did just fine. If anything, Xerox's "willingness" (intentional or not) to allow the root ideas to grow in various places has been a blessing to the IT industry as a whole. What you are suggesting is they could, or should, have become all the companies you listed. But that would gave been both impossible, and counter productive. Steve jobs saw the GUI, and Ethernet, and object orientated programming, and laser printers, and office software, and yet Mac is famous for just the GUI. Others would run with networking, programming, MS with office and do on. And in addition to those major players there were lots of others competing too. So no I don't think Xerox management needs to be embarrassed. They saw the value printing and ran with that. They left others to develop the other ideas. And in the long run we are much richer for that. So, from me anyway, there's no shame on them, rather a tip of the hat, and a nod to the vision they had to create PARC in the first place. They are the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- musicale 3y ago
  > Steve jobs saw the GUI, and Ethernet, and object orientated programming, and laser printers, and office software, and yet Mac is famous for just the GUI. Others would run with networking, programming, MS with office and do on. In the 1980s Apple adopted/commercialized: GUI -> Lisa (later Mac) Desktop LAN -> AppleTalk (NBP lookup eventually influenced mDNS) OOP -> Object Pascal (still exists in Delphi/Lazarus); arguably HyperTalk (messages/events/handlers) Laser Printers -> LaserWriter Office Software -> Lisa Office System; MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint And of course Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint debuted on the Mac. But your point is well taken - PARC alumni (and ideas) did not only land at Apple; for example, most of us have probably used Ethernet, Microsoft Word, PDF (derived from PostScript), etc.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Oh, I agree, Apple did ultimately make use of those technologies. They built on those ideas, but the again so did lots of others. I'm not suggesting Apple didn't (ultimately) embrace those technologies, but rather that they weren't the "driving force" behind them. Whereas you could say Apple was the "driving force" of the GUI. Microsoft would go on to drive Office software. There were word processors, and spreadsheets before Office, but Office integrated all those tools together and became the gold standard. Adobe would drive desktop publishing, PDF and so on. Sooo much of today's world is built on PARC, SRI, Bell Labs, and a couple others. It was an explosion of development and research seldom seen in any field outside times of war.
AlbertCory 3y ago
> From a business point of view, it was a disaster. Dead wrong. Laser printers alone were a $2B a year business. Printers, especially big ones, were right in their wheelhouse. If you want to argue it could have been so much more wealth, you're right.
- Affric 3y ago
  I think they’re referring to PARC specifically. Not Xerox as a whole
  - DaniFong 3y ago
    Laser printers were invented at PARC, the physicists were a whole other element of what was going on there, beyond the computer work
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Starkweather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Starkweather
- rented_mule 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm a bit jaded here. You're right that they made a ton of money, but left a lot of great work to fester, even in laser printing. My perspective comes working in Xerox engineering on high volume printers in the early 1990s. PARC folks repeatedly came through with great ideas about how to make the printers faster and cheaper (at the same time). My favorite demo they gave us was replacing the PDP-11 inside the printer, which was becoming increasingly expensive, with a Sun SPARCstation. They had done all the work to do a full demo on the prototype printer we were working on. Everything was much faster and it provided a lot more features. Plus development printer software could be developed in C or other languages, not just assembly. They were effectively told "that looks nice" and sent back to Palo Alto. That was hard to watch.
  - dhosek 3y ago
bitwize 3y ago
According to Kay, Xerox made more on the royalties for the laser printer alone than it cost to run the lab -- over 200 times more. They made a killing on PARC tech, just not as much as they could have if they were helmed by someone like Jobs or Gates.
wbl 3y ago
If you're not sure you can do it, why would you be doing that job?
axus 3y ago
Wouldn't the lesson learned be to invest in the cool ideas and companies that are generated, and avoid the mistakes of the past?

sydbarrett74 3y ago

As brilliant as Kay is, I'd be hesitant to put an 83 year-old as an active leader. I could see him in an emeritus/advisory role, however.

jdougan 3y ago
If he has any advantage, it would be that he paid attention to what made PARC work well at the time, and what working well actually feels like, and might be able to do something similar. OTOH, you're right, he could be ossified. The problem with an advisory role is no one has to listen to him, no matter how sensible he is.

mattbrewsbytes 3y ago

There should be a balance though, an open ended research lab that is a non-profit and generates ideas is going to have a tough time getting funding. Maybe this research lab should partner with something like YC so when an idea is nearing a production quality design, VC's can fund it to product fruition with some sort of royalty agreement with the research lab to fund more ideas. I would think a lot of highly technical, actual scientists (not some dude who's been hacking at CRUD web apps for a couple decades, aka me) would love to work at a place where constant academia/VC pressure is set aside to allow more pure research to happen.

UncleOxidant 3y ago

Bell Labs could do this because their parent company was a government sanctioned monopoly that didn't have to worry about about mundane problems like quarterly earnings. Xerox had the copier machine market pretty well to itself for a good 20 years which enabled them to fund PARC (sure, there were some competitors in that time, but they weren't taking a huge bite out of Xerox's profits yet). I think Apple could've done this a few years back when they had something like $100B cash on hand - they could have established a research foundation and provided it with funding that would've lasted for long enough for it to become self sustaining. Maybe Apple still could do this as they've got $73B cash on hand. $10B would go a long ways towards establishing an institution like this. Even better if other FAANG companies joined by providing seed funding, but maybe that looks too anti-competitive these days? (the incentive for providing initial funding could be a stipulation that funding companies get a break on IP license fees) Of course, as someone else mentions in this thread, this institution should learn from PARC's mistakes and do a better job of licensing their IP in order to keep operating for a longer term. I suspect we really need something like this. Bell Labs (and PARC) gave our economy a technological boost that it wouldn't have had without them. Maybe a revitalized SRI (with some additional outside funding) could become what you're talking about?

akozak 3y ago
Figuring out the right amount of endowment is quite difficult, but you certainly need a LOT to get the outcomes like PARC. Are you running it off interest or burning down the pot? Also possible that we are simply in a different techno-economic and scientific moment than those researchers were (ie it was cheaper for them). Also once you start framing it as investment or a biz decision in a big public company, the natural question is whether it's the best use of capital for Apple. It's not really about short vs longterm thinking either, it's about the deployment with the highest likelihood to return on any timeframe.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  > Are you running it off interest or burning down the pot? At some point in the future there should be some IP that could be licensed. If you're starting out with, say, a $10B endowment there should be investments that could sustain a certain level of operation for quite a long time until that IP license income kicks in. Towards the end of the article they talk about the land that PARC is situated on and how that's now very valuable and will provide a source of income for the new SRI/PARC - so they seem to have lucked out with a real estate investment that they didn't realize at the time would payoff later.

trhway 3y ago

>if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI wasn't for example OpenAI exactly that? The difference from the old times here seems to be that any advances are easily monetized today due to gigantic VC available, and thus the immediate ROI demand immediately arises from inside - from the employees, from the CEO down to lowest rank-and-file, who see the immediate potential to turn the advance into billions on the spot. Imagine if Alan Key and his colleagues could turn their inventions into billions in the next few months after making those inventions - I doubt they would have let Jobs to take the tour and practically steal the IP.

linguae 3y ago
You brought up something very interesting that I wish more people emphasized when discussing PARC. Alan Kay and his colleagues were not indifferent to business, far from it. In fact, they actively tried to get Xerox to commercialize their technologies. Many of them got frustrated and either joined other companies (Alan Kay went to Atari before going to Apple, Larry Tesler joined Apple before Alan Kay did, Charles Simonyi went to Microsoft and took Bravo with him, which helped lead to Microsoft Word) or started their own (Adele Goldberg started PARCPlace to commercialize Smalltalk).

foobiekr 3y ago

One of the underappreciated reasons both Bell Labs and PARC worked was they actually hired a lot of people who had already established themselves. One of the problem with young researchers, no matter how nobly minded, is that they will play the game. A PARC today would have almost no chance to avoid becoming a trend following mess. This is part of how they avoided the ROI catastrophe (researchers with enough cred could argue that there was a long term potential) and the publish or perish issues.

Solvency 3y ago
If that's the case and if older developers are always complaining/citing ageism or leetcode startups getting them down, why don't they band together to propose an R&D lab?
- linguae 3y ago
  1. Development and research are two different skills. Not all developers are good researchers, and not all researchers are good developers. With that said, there are people who are good at both; Dennis Ritchie and Jeff Dean are great examples. 2. The biggest barrier to starting a research lab is how will this lab make enough revenue to fund the lab’s operations and the living expenses of its staff? A significant challenge of running a research institute is fundraising. The first thing a lab must do is to establish a mission. Will this lab do long-term, speculative work or will it aim for shorter-term surer bets? What are the lab’s boundaries; what stipulations from funders can it live with, and what ones are unacceptable? I say this because as a researcher, I have learned The Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Another way of putting it: “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” It is often the case that money comes with strings attached; it’s up to the lab to determine which strings are acceptable or not.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  Because the current operating mode for almost all companies is a focus on shorter and shorter term results? Because while there is a place for some hands on developers at such a place that is not most of the staff? The Manhattan project hired a lot of engineers but none of them were the design leads.

bmitc 3y ago

I just don't think it's possible in a capitalist society and today's economic climate. Everything and everyone is chasing the bottom dollar and squeezing out any coin they can from products. I have heard Microsoft Research, someone that can afford an actual long term research center, even has more pressure to publish than academia.

linguae 3y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. We live in a world where the value of everything must be justified on a regular basis. The fundamental challenge with research is that it’s inherently risky, yet research institutions are expected to demonstrate “impact” (a.k.a. papers, patents, and $$$) on a regular basis in order to stay funded. This pressure is passed down from the shareholders and executives to middle management (or, in an academic context, the administration and tenured faculty evaluating non-tenured faculty and staff), who then passes it on to the researchers. I apologize if I come off as bitter, but as someone who got into research because I was inspired by reading about people like Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, and many other researchers from the previous generation, it’s a shame what science has become, but it’s a reflection of our society where the worth of persons and individuals is quantified in terms of money, and where anything that’s not perceived as making money is denigrated (such as the liberal arts).
- bmitc 3y ago
  You don't sound bitter. This is reality, and people have to shape their lives and thus wants, needs, dreams around this brutal reality and collection of constraints.
nextos 3y ago
Over-reliance on metrics leads to fragile organizations.

ulfw 3y ago

Alan Kay is 83. Why would you want him to run a lab that requires lots of administrative work?

JustLurking2022 3y ago

The environment you describe is self-destructive, which is why it is rare throughout history. Xerox PARC did it, and reaped almost none of the rewards for their innovation, so it perished. It only worked for Bell Labs because they had monopolistic control of telephony and could charge whatever they liked to subsidize their R&D. As soon as they lost the monopoly, it went down hill fast. Google is the closest thing to this in the past couple decades, and have seen all their investments in AI walk out the door to found competitors. Bottom line, pouring enormous amounts of money into pure research without demanding commercialization results certainly benefits researchers (who can pick up and take their research elsewhere) but runs companies into the ground.

linguae 3y ago
The problem with this analysis is that Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg did make efforts within Xerox to commercialize Smalltalk and related technologies. When Xerox fumbled, they went elsewhere: Alan Kay to Atari and then Apple, and Adele Goldberg founded PARCPlace. A similar story is the founding of Adobe by ex-Xerox PARC people; PostScript is the result of frustrations with Xerox’s strategy for Interpress. It wasn’t that the researchers were indifferent to or even hostile to commercialization; it’s that Xerox’s management fumbled repeatedly when it came to commercializing PARC’s research. Unfortunately the lesson industry learned from Xerox PARC is that research needs to be more tightly controlled by the company instead of the company’s direction being influenced by the research coming out of the lab, and thus industrial research labs, at least in computing, have undergone a transformation where it’s about near-term progress in areas that are closely tied to business strategy. I’ve worked in industrial research settings for much of the past decade and have seen the last vestiges of more free research die out. I can’t think of a company that was run to the ground by its research division, and even if such examples exist, this is an indictment on management for allowing research expenditures to sink the company, not research. Of course not all companies can afford the types of labs that Xerox and AT&T had when those labs were in their golden ages. However, I believe that the shift toward research driven toward short- and medium-term business needs, as well as academia’s focus on fundraising and publications, has effectively snuffed out unfettered research, where the only people in a position to pursue research that way are grad students with appropriate advisors and funding situations, tenured professors who are willing to take risks, and those working outside the system such as independent researchers. Where’s the next big thing going to come from if businesses are worried about the next quarter’s results and if academia has effectively abandoned freedom of inquiry in a quest for more money and prestige?