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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Full disclosure, though I worked with PARC folks, I was in the Webster (Wilson) research center which is often cast as the villain mothership print research center in the PARC story but isn’t really.
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People forget what Xerox actually got out of PARC and *didn’t* fumble. Gary Starkweather at Webster had idea for laser printer around the time the analog copier monopoly was busted, and was encouraged by his superiors to move to PARC to develop the idea.
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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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Henry Chesbrough’s Open Innovation book reaches the right conclusion. Xerox doubled down and made bank on what it understood and could take to market well, and let the rest gracefully exit.
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They could have probably made more $ than they did out of spin-out IP licensing but PARC culture was… a bit sloppy around IP shall we say 🤣
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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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The year I joined, 2006, the huge firefight was the fast wear-out rate on fusers on the iGen3 because print shops were using it for much higher area coverage than it designed for, so all hands on deck doing something about it. Company was bleeding money in support contract costs.
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Sorry ignore dumb wrong-math example above, got myself confused. The cost of the printer is irrelevant. Think in terms of $1 saved across a million printers per year by making an annual replacement part $1 cheaper
The big cost is downtime… a 500k printer expected to run continuously that’s down for a week costs the print shop tens of thousands in lost revenue, not just part cost
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