“For 40 years, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (commonly called Xerox PARC, now just PARC) has been a place of technological creativity and bold ideas. The inventions it has spawned, from Ethernet networking to laser printing and the graphical user interface, have led to myriad technologies that allow us to use computers in ways that we take for granted today. When it opened on July 1, 1970, PARC was set up as a division of Xerox Corp. The idea was to invest in PARC as a springboard for developing new technologies and fresh concepts that would lead to future products.”
My favorite sentence in the article:
I replaced “attention” with “time” and thought “so true”.
However, if true that they’ve failed to capitalize on many of their innovations, how come they’ve been running and still are? I could understand a government/public research center in that situation, i.e. with no absolute requirement to turn research ideas into marketable products, but a private company? Anyone got some insight into this?
They work on other things, like printable electronic components, heat-removable ink, and such. Also, they probably monetize their rather large patent pool.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xer…
Well, a company steal ideas from another one’s research lab, ships a product making use of these ideas, and gets a huge profit from doing so. This happened many time in the history of industry. I don’t see the point in posting this story here, it would probably better benefit to some debate about patent, intellectual property, and giving credit where it’s due…