Xerox's research arm now a business, execs say
Since its establishment in 1970, the Palo
Alto Research Center funded by Xerox
has developed groundbreaking technologies, including Ethernet, the GUI (graphical
user interface) and the computer mouse.
Xerox failed to profit from some of those technologies, ultimately made successful
by companies like Apple,
which hired researchers from PARC to develop the GUI. Xerox instead made money
from PARC projects such as laser printers, which fit the model of a document
and imaging company.
PARC was spun off from Xerox in 2002 and now focuses its research on technologies
that it can commercialize through its parent or startup companies. The technologies
it is researching include self-erasable paper, solid ink and intelligent documents.
From 280 researchers during its heyday between the late 1980s and early 1990s,
the lab now staffs about 165 researchers, who work with other Xerox researchers
worldwide.
IDG News Service sat down with Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox's chief technology
officer and Mark Bernstein, PARC's president and center director, to talk about
the lab's past inventions and future focus. An edited transcript of that interview
follows.
IDG: PARC invented some technologies that it failed to commercialize,
like the GUI and mouse. What exactly happened?
Bernstein: The core question people are asking is why didn't PARC turn
Xerox into a computer company. You have to look at .... proximal development
so Xerox could adopt things that it understood the risk and the value [of].
That clearly wasn't the case for the distributed computing environment that
was invented here. [Xerox] ended up creating business to take advantage of that
when it created the Star, but by that time the notion of there being a proprietary
hardware computing system wasn't going to fly and it was moving off to IBM PC
and Microsoft and Apple. [Star is an Information System workstation with a GUI,
mouse and Ethernet, introduced in 1981.]
IDG: How did Apple get the GUI? Did you license it to Apple?
Bernstein: They created their version of it. The notion of software
patents wasn't very well understood and they hired people who used to work here
and they created it.
IDG: Has PARC's business model changed?
Bernstein: It absolutely has. One of the things we've done here by bringing
business development people and sticking them in the labs -- they work with
the researchers in the lab. Very early on they are testing ... concepts and
later on they are trying to align the technology with the right application.
What you see, from Xerox's perspective -- their alignment of resources with
where their core business is as well as the recognition of where the next generation
of service technologies
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