The Comeback of Xerox PARC (opens in new tab)

After companies get to be a certain size it gets tougher and tougher to do basic research. Part ofbitbia corporate culture part is fear of undermining existing products.

The examples where this isn't true (lockheed Martin's skunkworks, Apple) are very rate. More common are large companies shifting from innovation to services (IBM an GE).

This makes sense. Will one company necessarily know how to commercialize a technology? This is one reason the Angel and VC models work. They separate the innovation from big company politics, and create an enviroent where killing old products is encouraged.

«The mouse, the graphical user interface, and the drop-down menu were all born at PARC—but it was Apple and Microsoft that commercialized them and made them cornerstone inventions of the PC industry.»

The mouse was never invented at PARC! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

I was thinking Yesterday that it would be nice for HP to return to being the kind of company Steve Wozniak wanted to work for, or others from that era to form or reignite a similarly desirable company. This is good news, I hope to see more of it.

This observation about technical innovation being only half the work in getting new technologies to market is something you could say about universities: my belief is that university research only goes about half the way necessary to get new ideas into the commercial world. Academics start companies to partly address that problem but mostly these operate in very specialized spaces; the academics get rich but the wider world sees little benefit. What if universities did what PARC is doing now?

I hope this will mean cheap printed rfid tags for us!