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Heck, go back to when Steve Jobs visited the Xerox PARC labs in late 1979 and saw the mouse and windows-computing for the first time.[1] Not that PARC was doing

Heck, go back to when Steve Jobs visited the Xerox PARC labs in late 1979 and saw the mouse and windows-computing for the first time.[1] Not that PARC was doing anything commercial with it, but those ideas definitely got incorporated into Apple's products. Jobs goes to PARC on a Thursday, and on Friday afternoon he is ordering one of his people to create a mouse for him. Now Xerox had invested in Apple and Apple got a tour of their research lab in exchange for that investment, but ideas do have value if you're not executing them efficiently and someone else can. [1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...

davidkatz 14y ago
Perhaps it's interesting to think about what the actual 'idea' here was. Did Xerox ever have the understanding that using mouse-windows computing would usher in a new era of computing? If not, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the real idea here was Jobs', and that it was built in part with building blocks created at Xerox, which is true for most progress - it's always built on previous progress by 3rd parties.
- grayc 14y ago
  From what I can remember of the Steve Jobs biography (and assuming it's accurate) yes, many people at Xerox understood that they had developed something revolutionary.
  - davidkatz 14y ago
    I wish we could get the story from Xerox's side. If they understood they had something revolutionary on their hands, why did they not try to market it themselves? What resource were they missing?
drp4929 14y ago
From the article quoted above ... "... Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So 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.” ... " I don't think either party had any delusion about the purpose of the "meeting".

davidkatz 14y ago

Perhaps it's interesting to think about what the actual 'idea' here was. Did Xerox ever have the understanding that using mouse-windows computing would usher in a new era of computing? If not, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the real idea here was Jobs', and that it was built in part with building blocks created at Xerox, which is true for most progress - it's always built on previous progress by 3rd parties.

grayc 14y ago
From what I can remember of the Steve Jobs biography (and assuming it's accurate) yes, many people at Xerox understood that they had developed something revolutionary.
- davidkatz 14y ago
  I wish we could get the story from Xerox's side. If they understood they had something revolutionary on their hands, why did they not try to market it themselves? What resource were they missing?

drp4929 14y ago

From the article quoted above ... "... Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So 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.” ... " I don't think either party had any delusion about the purpose of the "meeting".