

The Comeback of Xerox PARC - vdondeti
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/39222/

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bromagosa
«The mouse, the graphical user interface, and the drop-down menu were all born
at PARC—but it was Apple and Microsoft that commercialized them and made them
cornerstone inventions of the PC industry.»

The mouse was never invented at PARC!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart>

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stewbrew
It seems the ball mouse was:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse#Mechanical_mice>

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kokey
I was thinking Yesterday that it would be nice for HP to return to being the
kind of company Steve Wozniak wanted to work for, or others from that era to
form or reignite a similarly desirable company. This is good news, I hope to
see more of it.

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jpdoctor
> _it would be nice for HP to return to being the kind of company Steve
> Wozniak wanted to work for_

The soul of that company became Agilent when HP/Agilent split a decade ago.

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mathattack
After companies get to be a certain size it gets tougher and tougher to do
basic research. Part ofbitbia corporate culture part is fear of undermining
existing products.

The examples where this isn't true (lockheed Martin's skunkworks, Apple) are
very rate. More common are large companies shifting from innovation to
services (IBM an GE).

This makes sense. Will one company necessarily know how to commercialize a
technology? This is one reason the Angel and VC models work. They separate the
innovation from big company politics, and create an enviroent where killing
old products is encouraged.

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m0th87
I would argue the exact opposite: larger companies tend to have enough
resources floating around to be able to perform research. e.g. Bell Labs,
PARC, Watson, BBN...

VCs have their place, but they fund ideas with shorter runways. It's the
opposite model to research.

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mathattack
They have the resources to invest, but struggle to commercialize. This is why
so many of Xerox's great inventions were commercialized elsewhere. Even when
they have success stories (ibm's first PCs) they are usually hives off from
the rest of the firm.

Smaller firms lack development dollars but have more flexibility in finding a
market niche. For early stage innovation, being small also can force
simplicity.

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olliesaunders
This observation about technical innovation being only half the work in
getting new technologies to market is something you could say about
universities: my belief is that university research only goes about half the
way necessary to get new ideas into the commercial world. Academics start
companies to partly address that problem but mostly these operate in very
specialized spaces; the academics get rich but the wider world sees little
benefit. What if universities did what PARC is doing now?

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agilebyte
That kind of "academics" is done at Microsoft Research et al. If your focus is
"papers", you will very often only do the first part as you mention.

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daralthus
I hope this will mean cheap printed rfid tags for us!

