PARC, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and Bell Labs are comparable to the mecca of the IT world.
A large number of great inventions came out from here, which directly changed the entire computer industry.
Alto PC , Graphical User Interface , WYSIWYG , Ethernet , PostScript , Object Oriented Language , Laser Printer . Ultra-large scale Integrated circuit Design ...
But what is puzzling is that among these technologies and inventions that changed the world, Xerox only successfully commercialized laser printing. Almost all other technologies are not self-interested and only benefit others:
Alto PC, GUI technology inspired Steve Jobs to develop the Macintosh;
word processing, WYSIWYG allowed Microsoft to develop Word;
PostScript created Adobe.
Ethernet technology gave birth to 3Com.
Jobs later said: If Xerox realizes the value of Alto and seizes this opportunity, then nothing may happen to Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and its scale may now be as big as IBM and Microsoft combined...
Such a good card, how could Xerox lose?
Is the leadership ignorant? Don’t know the commercial value of your products and technologies?
Didn’t keep it confidential? Did Steve Jobs and Bill Gates steal technology?
is actually none of them. Let’s talk about PARC in detail today.
Origin
Xerox started out in the office copier market in the 1950s and developed rapidly in the booming office copying market. By 1970, it had become a Fortune 500 giant, the darling of Wall Street , and one of the "Best 50 Stocks ".
After getting money, Xerox thought about expansion and spent 918 million to acquire a large computer manufacturer called SDS.
You may not have heard of SDS, but you must have heard of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. The first node of ARPANET was built using SDS Sigma 7 at the University of California, Los Angeles. SDS was the first company to use silicon transistors to build computers, predating IBM.
(SDS Sigma 9)
"Look, now that we're in the digital computer business, we'd better have a fucking research lab!" said Xerox Chairman Peter McCollough. Thus, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was established.
PARC caught up with the good times. Due to the condemnation of the Vietnam War and the economic recession, military expenditures were cut, and the military's investment in university research was greatly reduced. Xerox offered high salaries, which attracted a large number of top researchers and engineers in Silicon Valley .
Some of these people come from DARPA (inventing ARPANET), some from Stanford SRI (inventing the mouse), some from MIT (inventing Sketchpad), and some from University of Utah (inventing the Flex computer). It can be said that they are a gathering of talents.
Alan Kay who later won the 2003 Turing Award said: In the mid-1970s, nearly half of the world's top 100 computer scientists worked at PARC!
Innovation
More importantly, PARC found an excellent manager, Bob Taylor. Although the former director of the DARPA Information Office was not a computer expert, he created a very free working environment for these geniuses.
Here, the boundaries between work and entertainment do not exist. While developing word processing programs and laser printers, these geniuses also developed multi-player graphical games.
Innovation is tangible, everyone is taking advantage of the latest experimental equipment developed by others, and most of the original ideas are thought of while sitting on the pod sofa, pulling on slippers, or playing with a vent ball.
Researchers are also allowed to bring their children. Let them use a variety of new gadgets and observe how children interact with new things.
The discussion at the lunch table is very lively. When one person has a new idea, he will gather people who are also interested in it to implement it. If the project is promising, an informal team will work on the project for half a year or more, but if the project fails, the participants will return to their original work and the project will disappear.
How to judge whether a project has prospects? PARC has a game called to beat the banker .
This is actually a weekly meeting. Before each meeting, a speaker will be selected as the dealer. The dealer will talk about the project's ideas and defend his own ideas, because other engineers and scientists will try their best to prove that the dealer is wrong.
Bob Taylor set the rules for "beating the dealer". At the meeting, arguments could only be based on the facts, and no personal attacks were allowed.
Bob Taylor specifically raised two types of disagreements in the discussion:
Type 1 disagreement: Neither side understands the other's true position.
Type 2 disagreement: Each side can clearly state the other's position.
Disagreement of the first type is discouraged, but disagreement of the second type is encouraged because it removes friction from arguments and produces higher quality ideas.
Of course, only ideas are not enough. PARC requires that system research must build a system. Otherwise, you have no idea whether your idea is good or not, and how difficult it is to implement. A system like
cannot be a joke prototype. It must be able to support at least 100 users . If it is a time-sharing operating system, it must be able to be run by 100 people, and if it is a personal computer, it must be able to build 100 units;
It is in this free environment that PARC's research results have become a towering tree and have produced fruitful results.
(click to see larger image)
failed
Despite having so many precious technologies, Xerox’s main business is still copiers and printers. It almost watched a group of “small companies” grow into giants using their own technologies.
PARC's management is managed according to the laboratory's best practices and is definitely not mismanagement.
Company leadership also realizes the value of the laboratory, otherwise support for PARC would not be so lasting.
PARC is also closely connected with other departments of Xerox and also focuses on commercialization. The laser printer is a technological breakthrough from PARC.
This is very puzzling. Why does Xerox's innovative research not produce the desired results?
Years later, Professor Henry Chesbrough of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Business, , carefully reviewed many of PARC's projects and interviewed more than 100 people. He came to a conclusion:
Xerox's problem lay in the way it managed innovation, a closed innovation paradigm that all leading companies had adopted after World War II.
Under this paradigm, companies will hire the best talents, research new products and services on their own, be the first to market, earn excess profits, enter the next cycle, and invest more in research and development.
Closed innovation has a product development funnel. Projects enter from the left and are screened and developed within the company until they are shipped to market customers on the right.
The logic of closed innovation is a virtuous circle, but in the era of PARC, several factors corroded the foundation of closed innovation:
3. The time to market of products and services is getting faster and faster, which makes the life cycle of specific technologies shorter and shorter, further challenging the logic of closed innovation.
We have seen 15 PARC employees poached by Apple , Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalf established 3Com, PostScript inventor John Warnock founded Adobe, Charles Simonyi brought WYSIWYG to the "small company" Microsoft... It is the embodiment of these factors.
Closed innovation is unsustainable, and a new innovation paradigm is emerging. This is open innovation .
In open innovation, companies use these internal and external research to create value. It assumes that internal research can also be brought to the market through channels outside the company's current business to generate additional value.
Simply put, knowledge is not limited to internal research, and products are not limited to existing markets.
Open innovation is essentially distributed innovation, because the knowledge available in modern society is distributed. No matter how big a company or organization is, it is difficult to innovate efficiently by relying solely on its own strength.
Later companies such as IBM, Intel, Cisco and other companies benefited from the concept of open innovation. For example, IBM fully embraced open source and invested US$1 billion in Linux to vigorously develop Linux-based servers. Open source and Eclipse have migrated all their paid commercial products to the open source architecture and achieved great success.
Reflection
Xerox PARC has given birth to many great inventions, but unfortunately it stands at a point in time. No matter how strong the company is, it cannot stop the torrent of history.
Xerox's innovations did not fail, they were diffused, laid the foundation of the modern IT industry, and achieved great success.
Looking back on this period of history, my biggest emotion is that Americans are indeed far ahead in the IT industry. They have established a good environment to encourage innovation and have produced a large number of outstanding results that lead the world.
What’s even more amazing is that when these innovations “fail” in a company, someone will conduct in-depth analysis, summarize experiences and lessons, and propose new theories to guide subsequent innovation activities.
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