What I said was that it worked out a lot better for Jobs than it did Xerox, not that they didn't get anything. It certainly didn't work out how they'd hoped. And that hasn't gone unnoticed by would-be funders of future Xerox PARCs.
> Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
I dunno, to me it feels like the people who are good at doing and investing in basic research are not the same kind of people who are good at building and investing in applications. Yes you can present a counterfactual where if only Xerox had Jobs' vision and execution everything could have been different... but chalking it up to just "they could have done it better and been successful" misses the fact that they were doing the best they could with the smartest people they could find, and still couldn't capitalize.
What I said was that it worked out a lot better for Jobs than it did Xerox, not that they didn't get anything. It certainly didn't work out how they'd hoped. And that hasn't gone unnoticed by would-be funders of future Xerox PARCs.
> Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
I dunno, to me it feels like the people who are good at doing and investing in basic research are not the same kind of people who are good at building and investing in applications. Yes you can present a counterfactual where if only Xerox had Jobs' vision and execution everything could have been different... but chalking it up to just "they could have done it better and been successful" misses the fact that they were doing the best they could with the smartest people they could find, and still couldn't capitalize.