曹竹book report:Dealers of Lightning

Book Name:Dealers of Lightning

Author:Michael A. Hiltzik

Here's the book site:
http://innopac.lib.tsinghua.edu.cn/search*chx/Y?SEARCH=Dealers%20of%20Lightning    

This book is about the first 13 years of Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center, when PARC developed laser printers, the ethernet, internets, networked personal computers, the client-server model, bitmap displays, icons and graphical user interfaces, the desktop metaphor and overlapping windows, and various other foundation of the computing world today. The book talks about technology and the people who generated technology. Including how the people gathered, how they interacted, and eventually how they dismissed.

The book talks about research and technology transfer in the way of sayings by the characters in the book and author. There are lots of helpful comments on what worked, and what did not, and why about research and technology transfer. Then the book discusses Steve Jobs's claim that "Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been, you know, a company ten times its size. Could have been IBM--could have been the IBM of the nineties. Could have been the Microsoft of the nineties." After weighing the good and bad side, the book concludes that it's not sure that Xerox can have that kind of success, even if it avoids all its known blunders. Xerox does received some success. For example, the laser printing alone repaid the cost of PARC many times over, while it's hard to believe it comes out of a simple research laboratory.

What impressed me is the book discusses the celebrities, whose talents and vision about computers that were way ahead of their time,  give good examples of what I should be. The first group of engineers working for Jack Goldman and George Pake in a warehouse across from Stanford University built a computer that acted much like the DEC PDP-10, a business computer at that time. The original problem is they couldn't have one DEC PDP-10 because Xerox had purchased rival computer-maker SDS, whose products were remarkably worse. So the talented team simply built themselves a clone. Later, they created the Alto, a true personal computer that had a mouse and graphical interface and built in ethernet(founded by Xerox, Intel and DEC).  They also created the first object-oriented language, Smalltalk, which was perfect for writing user-friendly applications for the Alto.

None of the innovations from PARC came to market. The book answers why Xerox did not turn its research into profits. While pouring money into PARC, they have problems with their main business, the leased copiers. The Japanese, the competitor, were making smaller cheaper copiers diminish Xerox's business markets. Xerox is also lacking salesmen to sell computers. Their salesmen usually dealt with office managers since they knew nothing about computers. From that, a lesson is learned that a business lacking salesmen understanding their products is disastrous.

In the mean time, the products created at PARC were marvelous, for instance, everyone wanted an Alto once they saw one in operation, but they were not suitable to marketing for the reason above. The book mentions that Xerox did sell some to the Carter administration for the government information office, but never set up a factory to build Altos.

Then the book criticised the blindness of Xerox toward the revolution happening with small computers. Xerox had no notion that small cheap computers were about to take the market by storm. When they finally transformed the Alto technology into the Xerox Star, it was too big, too slow, and too expensive, completely against the trend. IBM came out with its PC and businesses bought the cheaper product which make it leader of PC. I must say that I don't know the existence of Xerox while I heard IBM long ago which, in some sense, marks Xerox's failure. Then the time moved on to the beginning of the microcomputer revolution. The arrogance of not looking into the situation finally destroyed them.

The rise and fall of Xerox gives me much thought about how a successful business should run.  There's great needs for the insights to the future and all departments being fully functioning.