

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation. - boh
http://www.gladwell.com/2011/2011_05_16_a_creationmyth.html

======
spacemanaki
This was published in the New Yorker, and there was some discussion about it
when PARC posted something on their blog responding to it:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548325>

An interesting letter was printed in a subsequent issue:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627m...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627mama_mail3)
whose author wrote a longer blog post about this:
[http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-
smalltalk...](http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-
smalltalk.html)

I find that whole story a bit poignant, especially given that the MIT Scratch
app (Smalltalk based programming for kids) was not allowed into the iPad app
store.

------
brudgers
> _"Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working
> on the company's next generation of personal computers change course. He
> wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result
> was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon
> Valley."_

Actually, it was the Lisa.

And it was a failure.

As for it's fame, apparently Mr. Gladwell has never heard of it.

~~~
protomyth
His phrasing does imply that the first product with GUI from Apple was the
Macintosh and as you said, it was a failure. There were actually 3 (Lisa,
Macintosh, Apple IIGS).

Lord knows I don't want to defend Mr. Gladwell, but Jobs really didn't have
much influence on the Lisa and it could actually be viewed as a competing
product with the Macintosh.

~~~
nirvana
Jobs is the one that negotiated the Lisa team's visit to Xerox's labs.

Here's an article on the development of the Lisa you might be interested in
reading: <http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html>

~~~
protomyth
Yes, he got the visits, but he wasn't the leader or even a primary influencer
of the Lisa team.

------
iqster
Malcom Gladwell talking about innovation? No thanks! This is the same dude who
thinks Intellectual Ventures is an innovation machine.

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all)

~~~
kenjackson
If you read the article it's hard not to believe that IV is an innovation
machine. Hatred of SW patents aside their talent and ideas are pretty cool.

~~~
william42
Which just makes it even more tragic that such bright people are working for
the king of patent trolls.

~~~
noonespecial
Its damn near meta-tragic. Bright people thinking up things that they are
going to actively prevent from being invented.

------
Krylez
Gladwell does a tremendous job of cherry picking bits of information to form a
compelling narrative. I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient
data to be intellectually dishonest.

~~~
Anechoic
> _I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be
> intellectually dishonest._

Such as...?

~~~
spacemanaki
I've posted about Gladwell's critics before, I hope you forgive me linking an
older comment, but I don't want to just repeat myself. _edit_ This is a link
to the whole thread because it's worth reading for other discussion on
Gladwell.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758542>

I generally find him entertaining but always take anything I read by him with
a grain of salt.

~~~
technomancy
It would be more interesting/relevant to hear if you had any specific beef
with the particular article on PARC rather than rummaging up unrelated
complaints.

~~~
spacemanaki
I agree that I wasn't really being fair to Gladwell. I posted this comment to
support Krylez's more general assertion about Gladwell's style.

But I'll come out and say what I hinted at elsewhere in this thread: I really
wish Gladwell had bothered to tie together the threads between PARC, Alan Kay,
Smalltalk, Objective-C, the iPad, the Scratch app being banned and Apple's
vision of app-store-based-computing. It seems to me that he really missed out
on a exactly the kind of cherry-picking and narrative forming he's good at,
and in this case I think there might be a pretty interesting story buried in
there. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the history to know if there
really is, and it's likely it wouldn't have really worked in the New Yorker.

------
ragweed
I was driving by a Xerox site the other day with my 15-year-old nephew and he
asked, "What's "Xerox?" (He didn't even know how to pronounce properly). He'd
never even heard the word "xerox" used as a verb for photocopying, even.

------
podperson
Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like
"who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was
Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy."
It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure
out how to capitalize on it.

In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's
ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of
revolutionary products.

I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of
their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by
anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad).

And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably
made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about
word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox).

Xerox fermented ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly.

My apologies for rambling.

------
bromagosa
If you have the chance, you may want to read the book «Dealers of Lightning»,
which explains the whole story of Xerox PARC. The laser printer, Smalltalk,
the ethernet, text processing, the GUI, the Alto, the Bravo, the first laptop
etc. Everything is very well explained in a quite entertaining style.

IMO, a must read for every computer engineer, after all it tells the story of
almost everything computers are about today :)

[http://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&dq=isbn:08...](http://books.google.com/books?id=lzgOduibRJgC&dq=isbn:0887309895&ei=DNOCTvSuH8fiUO2IrOUH&hl=ca)

------
droithomme
I enjoyed this article. However at the end, he states that the reason Bach
created many works of genius is that he wrote so much music that statistically
some of it was bound to be great.

I feel this is a deeply flawed claim. First, I would like to see a list of the
works by Bach which are not staggering works of genius. What percentage of his
output is not in this category? Is it 0% or something ever so slightly more?

Compare this to my friend who sends me CDs of his latest compositions. He
produces several of these each year and all are uniformly poor. He is very
prolific yet the odds don't seem to be helping.

I would assert that raw talent is key, not producing tons of output and hoping
for the best.

------
superchink
This line really stuck out to me, adding a hint of perspective in a world
where A/B testing and the like are par for the course:

"Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you
could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn't
on a metric."

I shouldn't need to say this, but this in no way should be read to indicate
that such metrics and testing are not helpful; they're just not everything.

~~~
thirdhaf
Weren't spreadsheets, a la VisiCalc the killer business app for the Apple II?

On a more serious note I'm a true believer in RISK capital. Once your company
is actually profitable it seems like a great idea to ensure that you do a bit
of R&D in-house.

Worst case scenario you get a nice blurb somewhere about keeping corporate
research alive, best case you invent something ridiculously cool.

------
podperson
Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like
"who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was
Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy."
It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure
out how to capitalize on it.

In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's
ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of
revolutionary products.

I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of
their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by
anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad).

And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably
made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about
word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox).

Xerox had ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly.

My apologies for rambling.

------
nirvana
Some points on the article:

The GUI was a combination of inventions and innovations, some of which pre-
dated xerox and some of which were added by Apple.

The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a
large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that
Xerox had done.

I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI"
isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc.

"To this day, nothing sticks more deeply into he craw of Lisa and Macintosh
designers than the suggestion that all their interface work simply consisted
of making a copy of the work they saw at PARC[2]. This is simply not true. A
look at the revolutionary design of the Lisa interface shows that much more
was involved. Xerox never seriously intended to go to market. Apple was
primarily in the business of selling personal computers and could not afford
such a luxury. Apple had to design an interface intended for use by millions
of people. It had to be intuitive and robust. The Lisa team built the Lisa OS
from the ground up with the intention of making it friendlier to novice users.
The Lisa's engineers realized that the PARC's ideas had to be stripped down
and rebuilt to more demanding specifications[2]."

From: <http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html>

~~~
VladRussian
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt&characters=Bill)
Gates&sortOrder=Sort by Date

"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I
trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"

But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye,
before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.

"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's
more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his
house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

~~~
epistasis
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the changes from the Alto and
Star to the Macintosh, and the changes from the Macintosh to Windows
1.0-3.0-95.

However, I can never seem to find solid info on the Alto or Star, except
occasionally a fond remembrance of awesome equation handling or something
similar.

~~~
rbanffy
I think there is an Alto emulator out there. I never successfully booted it
however. There is also a Star emulator, made by Xerox, that runs on Windows,
but I also never successfully booted it to the desktop.

