World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. But the story also carries deeper assumptions about Apple, Xerox PARC, computer science in the late s, and even the nature of invention and innovation that deserve to be examined and challenged.
Both the Macintosh and Lisa projects were underway before the visit. Documents in The Book of Macintosh a collection of essays, technical specs, and brainstorms written by Jef Raskin on and others dating from the fall of months before the PARC visit-- show that the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts that is, bitmapped screens ; graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device.
The Lisa was also moving toward a bitmapped screen, under pressure from Raskin and Lisa's graphics engineer, Bill Atkinson. Atkinson argued that "if you're going to do mixed text and graphics together, you have got to use a white background," rather than a character generator screen. Jef Raskin likewise urged Lisa project manager Ken Rothmuller to use a bitmapped screen, and demonstrated the virtues of such a system by showing off a Macintosh prototype. But a number of Apple engineers were already familiar with PARC, its work, or technologies like the mouse.
Bill Atkinson had read about Smalltalk as an undergraduate. Some had worked at PARC: Jef Raskin spent time there during a sabbatical year at Stanford, and had a number of friends who were researchers there. Finally, there were even some Apple employees whose had learned about the mouse while working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the s and early s, or Tymshare in the later s.
Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in Steve Jobs was on the second of the two.
Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. And there's nothing "natural" about that. Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation in software circles for being technologically derivative. In other words, Microsoft has borrowed or bought every good idea it's ever had.
This theory isn't unfounded. They didn't code the original Internet Explorer, either: They licensed the source code from Spyglass Inc. Defenders of Microsoft know that the company isn't such a great technological innovator -- Gates didn't realize the potential of the Internet until -- but they will say the company has some of the most cutting-edge business ideas in the field [source: Colony].
Think about it. Before Microsoft came along, no one had entertained the idea of selling software and hardware separately [source: Rapoza ]. Gates, Steve Ballmer and other Microsoft executives foresaw the lucrative potential in licensing their operating system to dozens of different PC hardware makers.
When the Harvard Business Institute studied the secrets of Microsoft's success, they pinpointed the company's innovative approach to its intellectual property [source: Silverthorne ]. Microsoft has created a gargantuan library of proprietary source code "components" that work across the Windows platform. If a developer proves his loyalty to Microsoft, he gets access to that code library -- and hundreds of millions of potential Microsoft customers.
All of these are adjectives that former and current Microsoft colleagues and competitors have used to describe William Henry Gates III. But would those critics describe him as evil? Not in a million years. When Gates announced that he was stepping down from daily operations at Microsoft in July , it spawned a flood of articles about his legacy. Some compared him to Henry Ford, another person who took an expensive, rarified technology and devised an ingenious way to selling it to the masses [source: Ferguson ].
Microsoft's long-time mission was to have "a PC on every desk and in every home. Some journalists and pundits chose to compare Gates to Henry Ford, but a more apt comparison might be to Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron who engaged in ruthless business practices before dedicating the final years of his life to philanthropy.
By the time he died in , he'd given away all of his ill-gotten riches to found museums, libraries, parks and numerous charitable organizations. Clausen: Xerox tries to hit 'reset' with Conduent split. Bill Gates: If a robot takes a human job, it should be taxed. Bill Gates sees innovation solving world problems. Share your feedback to help improve our site!
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