Name: Fumbling the future
ISBN: 9781583482667

Fumbling the future

Ask consumers and users what names they associate with the multibillion dollar personal computer market, and they will answer IBM, Apple, Tandy, or Lotus. The more knowledgable of them will add the likes of Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, Compaq, and Borland. But no one will say Xerox. Fifteen years after it invented personal computing, Xerox still means "copy." Fumbling the Future tells how one of America's leading corporations invented the technology for one of the fastest-growing products of recent times, then miscalculated and mishandled the opportunity to fully exploit it. It is a classic story of how innovation can fare within large corporate structures, the real-life odyssey of what can happen to an idea as it travels from inspiration to implementation. More than anything, Fumbling the Future is a tale of human beings whose talents, hopes, fears, habits, and prejudices determine the fate of our largest organizations and of our best ideas. In an era in which technological creativity and economic change are so critical to the competitiveness of the American economy, Fumbling the Future is a parable for our times.

What Hacker News says

ChuckMcMApr 2023

Not to be snarky but do you realize that what you have stated is the definition of working against each other? Research teams are about getting to the paper and a deeper understanding, product teams are about getting something out the door that helps you capture value whether you understand it or not. Engineering research teams are notorious for being both ungovernable and spending so much time "understanding" their ideas that they miss the market window. The canonical book on the subject for me was "Fumbling the Future" which talked about Xerox PARC, I worked in Sun Labs ("where good ideas go to die"), hired people out of Microsoft's BARC (Bay Area Research Center), and worked in IBM's Watson group which pulled a bunch of people out of research to "make a product out of AI".

It is a really hard problem to "commercialize" imagination or innovation. Two very different mindsets between "doing product" and "doing research." DOW Chemical did a pretty good job of it, but they have always been more "components of the solution" rather than the full solution.

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dfrageMay 2019

Xerox and the personal computer at the level of what became engineering workstations. The book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer covers this fairly well as I remember.

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dxfMay 2018

I enjoyed reading "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer"[0]. At the end of the first half of the book, you wonder how anything can stop Xerox. In the second half, you learn how Xerox can stop Xerox.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/638812.Fumbling_the_Futu...

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redtextureJul 2016

The story of staggering institutional inertia and failure is amazingly similar to Xerox's, and similar to hundreds of other US corporate manufacturing giants declining into bankruptcy over the last 40 years, by failing to be concerned with, or collectively act on (board, executive, staff) the future year risks of on a several-decade time scale. This list of inertially failing organizations, among others, includes General Motors, IBM, HP, AT&T, and others.

[Can any public company plan on a multi-decade time scale? This is an anthropological, sociological, cultural and business question of interest in the academic literature.]

Others, along with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, have written extensively on the general cultural difficulty of spending money now for an uncertain future while making money presently on a multi-decade investment.

Xerox was originally under the thumb of Kodak, in Rochester, New York, as the maker of photographic paper, chemicals and related equipment, known as the "The Haloid Photographic Company" (halides -- bromine and related chemical elements, along with silver, being the key photographic chemicals of photography) and founded in 1906.

The owner-leadership of the Haloid company in the 1930s and 1940s knew the company was doomed in the long-run with their then-present capability. Later on, it turns out that neither the Xerox of 1995, nor the Kodak of 1995 understood the necessity of having a keen paranoia of their technology's changing future and future unreliable income.

Xerox's, Kodak's, and other corporate stories are both studied in graduate-level business and engineering programs looking at the risks of failing to plan for change, the end of patent monopoly and market domination, and the cultural and financial necessity for understanding, committing to, and planning on the demise of the present technology currently sustaining an organization.

The Haloid company was not crushed by Kodak, in part, because of antitrust laws, but it was always in danger of failing in a competitive market dominated by Kodak, and from the 1930s onward had committed money to find and own a technology that was sustainable and patentable to survive: the Haloid company invented the term "xerography" (dry image transfer).

After the growing success of xerography in the late 1950s, and 1960s, after near-death experiences bringing the technology to market, the culture of developing and ultimately surviving on the new market of new-but different technology was lost in the profits of xerography in the minds of the then-present executive leadership, addicted to the amazing profits of xerographic patents: thus the results of new research and technology failed to be supported to make it to market.

Yet the Xerox company's creations, developments and discoveries are the present backbone of the present era of computing: ethernet, laser printers, personal computers, graphical user interfaces, Smalltalk (see also Object Oriented Programming and Virtual Machines, and the like). Look up the history of Xerox's "Palo Also Research Center (PARC). The Smallalk VM was the foundation of Self, and the later Java VM, with the addition of a couple decades of further work.

See "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander for that story, published in 1988, nearly three decades ago. The cultural failures and non-response parallels are remarkable.

Doubtless there are dozens of similar reports on the Kodak cultural inertia and failure to understand change, in academic articles, and books. Google is your friend.

Kodak leadership thought that they could not profit from digital cameras, and early and expensive technology could only be used by large institutions (NASA). As costs dropped, Kodak thought that their market was commodity consumables, so they licensed the technology they created. The consumables chemistry and photographic films and papers market ended with with the rise of digital photography (no negatives), and digital, color ink-jet and xerographic reproduction of images.

EDIT: halide elemental chemical family

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hgaAug 2013

The original AT&T was an official government monopoly so the very existence of Bell Labs was in part a tax it payed to avoid problems. As I recall it also wasn't allowed to do things like sell UNIX(TM) for serious money prior to the United States v. AT&T 1982 consent decree ... which I notice is the same year UNIX System III was released.

Xerox, though ... well, a good book on that is Fumbling the Future: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp... ... which is still in print after it's 1988 debut.

That isn't even an example of disruptive innovations almost never happening in established companies, Xerox just wasn't doing that sort of thing to begin with. Well, they bought Scientific Data Systems at the top in 1969 and fumbled that by the middle of the '70s....

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ChuckMcMJan 2013

"Redmond spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future."

Two words, Xerox PARC.

At Sun there was a weird joke that Sun Labs was where good ideas went to die. It was frustrating.

The point here is that good R&D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work. Strangely the hardest thing about that is not making a product out of it, the hardest thing is making a product you can ship.

Good R&D isn't constrained, which is to say that you don't tell the folks doing the research you are only researching things we can sell for a profit, but that is a constraint on products. What happens is the 'Apple effect' where you have a bunch of researchers who can't make a profitable product (Xerox Star) and then a product guy comes along (Steve Jobs) who sees the essence of the innovation, and can strip away the parts where it goes too far and ships that.

Its really challenging to build something close to your vision and not ship it, it seems like it is impossible to build something that is close to your vision and then ship something only half as close as that. But that is where the success can be. "Fumbling the Future" [1] is a fascinating read for that reason.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...

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