Conversation

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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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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