"It's a good story. Unfortunately, it's also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong."
Full details at https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
and there are many other references on the Web about that visit.
Inventing the Future forbids any hindsight. No one knows how it will turn out.
Hence the title: what if we DO allow hindsight?
"PARC was not at all secretive about its work. Its researchers published widely, and there was a regular flow of traffic between PARC and Stanford's computer science community. "
as opposed to a military intelligence company where all that would get you fired if not in prison.
However, in here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
I calculate some of the other PARC spinoffs they did. If they'd held onto all of it, it would dwarf the value of the copier & printer business.
It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.
Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.
Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.
