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THE KING OF COMPUTER LABS | PAGE 1, 2
Yet at the same time, a 125,000-employee company like Xerox was overwhelmingly focused on one single task -- leasing huge copiers and charging for each page copied. Most of the sales force couldn't be trained to adapt to selling personal computers or other PARC innovations without great expense and massive corporate readjustment. It's not fair, Hiltzik suggests, to blame Xerox for "blowing it" -- it simply wasn't in a position to take advantage of its own research success. Moreover, Hiltzik even makes a good case that Xerox didn't completely fumble the ball. Xerox PARC's invention of the laser printer alone earned Xerox billions of dollars, more than recouping its investment by several orders of magnitude. Much smaller companies -- like Apple and Microsoft, both of whom have cherry-picked scads of former PARC researchers -- could, as Hiltzik points out, bet the company on a single idea or a new corporate strategy. On a wider scale, we now have a whole economic infrastructure devoted to funding new ideas and innovations: venture capital. When Xerox PARC was first assembling its research team, the venture capital model was still in its infancy. For the researchers who flocked to Palo Alto, the opportunity provided by Xerox was unprecedented. "Nobody was going to float money and start a company for them, as they would today," Hiltzik quotes one former PARC staffer. As a result, even though Microsoft is now spending billions on basic research and Paul Allen's Interval Corporation is explicitly trying to recapture the PARC magic, we may never see the like of Xerox PARC again. "What is indisputable," writes Hiltzik, "is that Xerox did bring together a group of superlatively creative minds at the very moment when they could exert maximal influence on a burgeoning technology, and financed their work with unexampled generosity." Such moments, or "inflection points" -- a term Hiltzik borrows from Intel's Andy Grove -- don't come around very often. And even if another one might appear on the horizon, chances are that the best minds in an up-and-coming field would be too busy sorting through business plans to be able to unite as a cooperative group. Hiltzik doesn't directly address the question of who might be, in the long run, best situated to fund such open-ended research as Xerox did, but the answer seems obvious. As an administrator at ARPA -- the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Administration -- Bob Taylor was directly responsible for kicking off the entire field of computer graphics and the Internet; later, given the same free hand at Xerox PARC, he helped create the personal computer. But no one blames the federal government for not getting its money's worth from the Net or computer graphics, as they do Xerox for not dominating the personal computer business. Perhaps there is, after all, a little room for a follow-up to "Dealers of Lightning" -- an addendum encouraging a return by the government to open-ended funding of basic research. The next Alto could be just another government grant away.
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