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Dealers of Lightning is the best book about PARC. Fumbling the Future is more of a polemic but less respectful. I’d recommend reading both if interested. Also Copies in Seconds, the og Xerography story, provides context from the copy/print history. They’re not quite villains.
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Someone at HP Labs once explained to me the tension between interesting research and finding a way to make a tiny improvement to ink jet cartridges. As he said: the latter were probably worth $100 million / tiny improvement. So it was a difficult line to walk...
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The laser printer was a marginal part of the computing revolution and would have been incremental for Xerox if it had not been monopoly-busted, but because it did get busted, the laser printer immediately turned into the new moat. $100b self-disruption
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Though the net value of all the other “fumbled” (spun out really) computing technology dwarfed it in the 80s, the laser printer was huge and triggered the even bigger offset-busting production print biz in the 90s.
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But overall fair assessment. While I was at Webster the focus was on tiny improvements that would translate to billions through multiplier effects. $1 saved per replacement part per year for a $500k production printer x 100 is $50m
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