It was perhaps beyond anyone’s imagination that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc., visiting the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), California, in December 1979 would forever alter the course of the development of personal computers. The visit further pushed the Apple brand that was already leading the market.
Xerox Holding Corporation has ruled the photocopier market since 1959 when its engineers developed the first commercially viable copy machine. The patent for developing photocopying technologies and the consequent monopoly across America earned the company huge profits over the next decade. However, when the patent expired, Xerox faced stiff competition from various Japanese companies, including Canon. In the wake of new challenges, in 1970, Xerox decided to establish a research and development centre under the leadership of Jack Goldman.
The purpose of this centre was, of course, to develop new technologies that would help maintain Xerox’s leadership. Goldman created an environment wherein his team was encouraged to ideate, innovate, have freedom of thought, experiment and brainstorm to come up with new ideas. With such a conducive environment, PARC’s innovative team sowed the seeds of many life-changing technologies, such as the computer mouse, ethernet networking and graphical user interface (GUI). Germination is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the seed to grow into a tree and bear fruit.
Xerox’s management was unable to foresee that these buds of technologies were capable of blossoming into huge opportunities. They perhaps did not want to invest in and support anything other than the successful business of photocopiers. Undeterred by the management’s indifference, by March 1973, the PARC team had invented their path-breaking Xerox Alto. The machine incorporated a mouse and GUI a decade before mass-market GUI machines would become available. GUI allows a user to interact with the computer through graphic elements such as symbols, icons and buttons. Before GUI, the most common way to communicate with the computer was to write text commands in the command line interface. Users were required to remember numerous standard commands even for seemingly simple actions such as creating a file, opening, copying, moving, etc. GUI made interacting with computers so user-friendly that even a child can operate basic commands on a computer.
PARC gained its name for groundbreaking innovations across the world. Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the personal computer revolution, initially felt reluctant to visit PARC. However, he went there in December 1979. His words about the visit are reproduced below:
I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing. And so, I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on. And they showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that.
The other one they showed me was really a network computer system. They had over a hundred Alto computers, all network using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that.
I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
Now, remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete. They’d done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn’t know that at the time. And still, though, the germ of the idea was there, and they’d done it very well. And within, you know, 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday. It was obvious.
The rest is history. Apple introduced the desktop computer Lisa in January 1983. It was one of the first personal computers to offer the GUI in a machine aimed at individual business users. Apple Macintosh, introduced in January 1984, featured the GUI and first single-button mouse. In November 1983, Microsoft presented its GUI called Windows along with a mouse-based word processor called Microsoft Word at the Computer Dealers’ Exposition (COMDEX).
The inventions by PARC researchers remained an academic feat until Steve Jobs envisioned the future of these technologies. This was not the first time that an invention remained buried for years, ignored despite its potential benefits and subsequent commercialization. Benjamin Franklin was credited with discovering electricity in 1752 when he conducted an experiment using a kite and key on a rainy day to demonstrate the relationship between lightning and electricity. Only after around 70 years of the discovery of electricity, Faraday invented the first electric motor in 1821.
After another 58 years, Thomas Edison patented the first electric bulb in 1879. However, the twenty-first century is a different time. If a leader fails to envision the future, other visionaries will replace them. What Xerox leaders could not comprehend for years, Steve Jobs realized in a single visit. One of the PARC researchers who demonstrated the inventions to the Apple team led by Steve Jobs said, ‘After an hour looking at demos, they understood our technology and what it meant more than any Xerox executive understood after years of showing it to them.’
Uncertainty is inherent in the VUCA world, which makes it extremely challenging to visualize the future. In the twentieth century, we could still foresee what kind of life, education and career the next generation would have, but today, we are clueless. When we were engrossed in the virtual world created by social media, Mark Zuckerberg was envisioning its future and creating a new immersive virtual world—the metaverse.
Leaders of the VUCA world need to assess the far-reaching impacts of digital technologies on the market, competition, customer expectations, business processes, forward and backward linkages, end-to-end supply chains, and the industry ecosystem as a whole.
This excerpt from ‘Lead Smart in the AI Era’ by Amit Kumar Jain and Surbhi Jain has been published with permission from Rupa Publications.