Reinventing Xerox PARC As a Money Maker 99
bonch writes "After a historical reputation for not monetizing breakthrough technologies (including the mouse and desktop GUI), Xerox PARC is now focused on making money from its inventions. CEO Anne Mulcahy vowed in 2001 to return the company to profitability, encouraging 'open innovation' and mandating that research turned a profit. The latest innovation is thin-film printed electronics, intended for a variety of products, from RFID readers to price labels."
Founder of Xerox PARC passes away (Score:5, Informative)
Talk about creepy timing.
Jacob Goldman, Founder of Xerox Lab, Dies at 90 [nytimes.com]
In this article they even discuss criticisms of Xerox not commercializing technologies developed at PARC.
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Informative)
Another corporation similar to Rambus which invents stuff and then demands royalties for licenses and patents.
Not at all. PARC invents things and then licenses their inventions to those that would like to commercialize them. Rambus patented something they managed to get written into a JEDEC specification.
You are free to choose whether or not you use PARCs IP. Rambus tried to make it impossible to conform to an industry specification without infringing on their IP.
One is a business, one is a troll. If you can't tell the difference, then too bad for you.
Re:CEO Still There!?! (Score:5, Informative)
Does this mean Xerox has a chance?
Xerox PARC hasn't existed for a long time. PARC was sold off. It is not affiliated with Xerox and lacks most of what made Xerox PARC cool in the first place.
Oh, and it's a mistake to say, as TFA claims, that PARC was famous for failing to commercialise its inventions. I can think of at four things off the top of my head that made Xerox more money than the total operating costs of PARC for the entire time that Xerox ran it.
Re:CEO Still There!?! (Score:4, Informative)
PARC was sold off.
You should have told them that as they don't seem to know. In fact, they even contradict your position on their website: PARC - A Xerox company.
Damn companies keep thinking they know who they are better than Slashdotters that don't even RTFS, much less RTFA.
It was all about cost (Score:5, Informative)
.... where Xerox marketed the Xerox Alto as the first commercial GUI driven computer in 1973?
As someone who visited PARC in 1975, and later spent some time programming an Alto, I can say that it wouldn't have been cost effective. PARC's plan, in the early 1970s, was to figure out what the future of computing would be like when the cost of hardware came down. The Alto was built without much regard to cost. The page-sized CRTs were hand-built at PARC itself, and the CPUs were made by Data General for Xerox. They were minicomputers, not microprocessors, basically Data General Novas with a different microcode. An Alto cost upwards of $20,000 to make.
Before PCs, there was a whole industry, led by Wang, in what were called "shared-logic word processors". These were a group of dumb terminals connected to a central unit with a CPU, disk, and printer. Places which did a lot of document revision, like law offices, bought such systems. Xerox came out with the Xerox Star, which was a cross between Alto technology and the dedicated word processor concept, and went into that market, at too high a price point. This was in the late 1970s. IBM introduced the IBM Displaywriter in 1980, with the same monitor that was later used with the IBM PC. Three displays, a printer, and a central control unit cost $26,000.
Getting costs down was a huge problem. The consensus in the industry was that the minimum useful personal computer would be a "3M" machine - one megabyte of memory, one MIPS of CPU power, and one megapixel of display. The Alto was there, but the early PCs, the Apple II, and the original Mac were well below those specs. The Lisa approached the 3M level but cost too much. (The original 64K Macintosh was a miserable flop commercially. Until the 512K Mac and the laser printer, with the specs approaching the "3M" level, did it make money.)
There was another line of development - UNIX workstations of the early 1980s. For about $20K, Apollo, Sun, Three Rivers, IBM and others sold UNIX machines with big screens and enough CPU and RAM power to get something done. They all suffered from appallingly bad GUIs. Then, as now, the UNIX crowd had no clue about user interfaces. For years, Sun workstations mostly had nothing but text windows open. (Plus an analog clock, the most widely used graphic program.) What passed for a GUI tended to be some scheme for front-ending command line programs with a menu system.
If the UNIX industry had had a clue about graphics, the industry might have gone that way when the hardware cost came down.