You noticed that there were lots of young graduates, but also lots of old staff. With very few people in-between that age range. You'd then realise they'd get graduates and utilised them until they left. While the older staff generally got to a certain salary band, were satisfied and then stuck around until their generous pension could mature.
It was like working in a Dilbert strip with a huge amount of bureaucracy and process, with cargo culting thrown in. All the processes were internal to Xerox too and had acronyms prefixed with X as it was stuff like "Xerox Process Improvement Process".
At the other end of the scale the amount of research I heard about was amazing. They had numerous patients on e-ink displays way before ebooks like the Kindle came to market. But they never seemed to actually make something marketable apart from printers.
I remember being told about a room they had in the R&D labs (again 15 years ago) and it was all white boards. On the ceiling of the room was a camera that scanned all the whiteboards. You could write on the white boards a p in a square [P] and it would send the contents of that wall to the printer, or an e in a square then an e-mail address and it would then send it off as an e-mail instead.
I remember having a debate with another developer. He thought that an IP address started with 13 (13.X.X.X) was a generic internal IP address like 192.168.X.X.
At the time Xerox owned the whole 13. Address block.
I'm glad that Fujifilm bought them rather than a completely unrelated business like, say, a patent troll or Oracle.
Alan Kay said it best:
"I don’t run CDG, I visit it. [Xerox PARC founder Robert] Taylor didn’t want to hire anyone who needed to be managed. That’s not the way it works. I have people on my list who are already moving in great directions, according to their own inner visions. I didn’t have to explain to these people what they would be working on, because they already are."
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xer...
So there really are two prerequisite things to great innovation:
- populating your group with people who are at the very top of their game
- finding someone with the right balance of hard/soft skills needed to both be respected by these brilliant researchers, and to act as an interface between them and the rest of the company politics/bureaucracy/etc (for a startup, that'd be investors/boardmembers/etc.) and make sure they stay on track.
Each of these things is crazy hard, and accomplishing both is exponentially so. Which is why these brilliant teams only appear every once in a while, and even then are still likely to fail.
Neither was really subject to any kind of market pressure too.
I know this is just the writer and not Fuji Xerox, but how would that even work? Instant cameras use an analog medium, so it seems like anything you could do with AI would be limited.
Yeah...that's a reach, you're right.
