I love books about mistakes. It’s not just a matter of liking seeing people fail but there’s real value in learning from other peoples mistakes. The bigger the screwup the bigger the lesson. In Fumbling the Future the authors showed how Xerox basically invented the personal computer years before IBM or Apple then failed to make any money off of it.

A bit of background: Xerox was the first company to make a photocopier. They then made a not uncommon move: they didn’t sell their equipment they leased it and charged per copy. A few years after they released their first copier and they had more money than they knew what to do with.

But they knew that wouldn’t last. Technology would soon make photocopiers obsolete (right?) the future would belong to computers not dead trees (also, robots were clearly promised but remain undelivered). Xerox would commit itself to developing the “Architecture of Information” which make it a leader not just today but for decades to come. So Xerox created the most prestigious and well-funded computer think tank to come up with the technologies of the future: PARC.

And they did.

Xerox’s PARC invented the first Personal Computer (the Alto) years before IBM and Apple. They invented WYSWYG word processor (two of them in fact: bravo and gypsy), developed the mouse, the concepts of windows and GUIs, idea of distributing personal computing across a network and sharing resources, Ethernet, and SmallTalk.

So why does Xerox still mean copies instead of computers or technology or vision?

Xerox failed to monetize these technologies for a few reasons which have now become common IT counter-patterns:

• In 1969, Xerox acquired Scientific Data Systems to get a foot hold in the computer market. The idea was that PARC would develop the technology and SDS would make it into products. Makes sense, right?


• Unfortunately, PARC’s engineers had two main attributes: 1) they were the best and 2) they knew it. PARC’s teams didn’t have much regard for SDS who made a living by not competeting with the elephant in the room.  SDS never developed anything that PARC created.


• Xerox required so many signoffs on even the most minor change that in the end no one was responsible for anything. It’s important to consult experts but eventually responsibility has to fall on someone.


• Xerox managers, largely number driven managers from GM, weren’t really equipped to develop new technologies (after having come from GM’s “optimize the factory” environment). They tried, and were rewarded, for cutting costs and setting aggressive deadlines which they weren’t qualified to set. This created the inevitable environment where engineers cut quality to meet deadlines.


• The above two points made wouldn’t have been such a problem but Xerox eventually lost it’s monopoly. The disconnect between management, reality, and engineers meant that when competitors entered the market with “acceptably worse” quality but pleasantly lower prices Xerox didn’t even know how to compete. Nor could it learn – the company wasn’t able to conceive a world where they weren’t the kings of copies.


• The crunch caused by competitors made an increasingly defensive and conservative company more so. No executive nor upper manager wanted to risk their corporate necks on personal networked computing in an age where timeshared computing was still new (also, in part, pioneered by PARC). By the time Xerox finally got an executive with enough guts to push into PCs it was too late: IBM and Apple had beat them to it.

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