Comment by escherplex
10 years ago
A reminder of how curious it is that PARC had all of Kay's, Smith's and Wirth's handiwork under their belt, all the rudiments of today's PC with mouse-controlled icon WYSIWYG GUIs back in the late 1970s, and never had the imagination to go anywhere viable with it (but give it away as dramatized in 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'). Same could be said of PalmPilot and the smart phone.
I do Xerox PARC archeology, always looking for documentation from those days.
This was triggered by having been a Smalltalk and Oberon user on their glory days.
It made me realise how much the IT world lost by having UNIX clones going mainstream instead of these systems. Specially the culture that still insist in using their computers as if they had a PDP-11.
Sounds fantastic, but I'm sure it's not. If you made billions on a product such as did Xerox you'd be keen to fully investigate a technology that threatens to supplant your bread and butter product, fear will drive you to do this. Once the product has been developed you will look at it and say "Product X has a return of y, while there are zero customers for this newfangled product", this is more than enough for the board to reject the new idea, many of them think the new technology is just a passing fad anyway.
I wouldn't call it lack of imagination, and it was all quite viable. Senior management simply punted on listening to anyone.