Pat, (01)
The Xerox Alto shows how corporate management cannot see the
potential of products that fall outside their corporate strategy: (02)
> They were never promoted commercially, but they were a mature,
> finished product. [Xerox] Rochester was using I think five of them
> all linked by network for office work, administration and general
> computing support. It was the first time I had ever seen a WYSIWYG
> word processor, and it blew my mind. (03)
Rochester was the home of the original copier business, and it
remains Xerox HQ. Management couldn't see what was happening
right under their noses, because they never paid attention to
what their secretaries were doing. (04)
But I would put a large part of the blame on PARC management.
They should have noticed how the Alto was being used at Xerox HQ.
All they had to do was to count how many offices in the world
could use such systems, multiply by 5, and use the numbers for
their business case. To sell their proposal, they could just
ask the CEO to walk down the hall and look. (05)
Researchers at IBM knew about the PARC products, but they had
no more influence on the corporate decision makers than the
researchers at Xerox. And they didn't have a demo to show them. (06)
Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, saw the potential, and the rest
is history. The reason why Apple succeeded where Xerox and
IBM didn't is that Jobs also happened to be the CEO. (07)
John (08)
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