> In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”
This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in exchange for $1M worth of pre-IPO Apple stock, which today would be worth [checks notes] more than that. There was no theft.
Apple engineers got to see the Alto, not the Star (the screenshot in the article is wrong, the chronology is wrong). The visit was so fast that Apple engineers thought they saw realtime overlapping windows when they didn’t. [0] So it’s possible Xerox was inspired by Apple with the Star, not the other way around.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates totally outs himself as someone who would steal shamelessly.
He's famous, so his view is the one that's most commonly regurgitated, but that doesn't make it the most correct one.
Steve's point of view is one point of view, in a story that involved ~10 people. When you hear the story from each person's point of view and union them, the subtly-incorrect aspects of his perspective become pretty glaring.
top comment: "The credit should be given to poet T S Eliot (1920): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”
and its reply: "So really it has nothing to do with stealing whatsoever"
If you read a bit about it, you'll understand that Apple did not copy the Alto—they did something that was actually way harder. They created a better version of what the Alto was attempting to do, and got it to run on lower-grade hardware they could sell for 1/10th the cost.
But yes, Xerox knew exactly what they were doing when they invited Steve and his team in.
> exceptions are when they're covered by copyright or patent
And when there's (A) an enforceable confidentiality agreement (written or, sometimes, oral), and/or (B) an implied obligation of confidence, e.g., for employees, corporate officers and directors, and possibly others, depending on the facts and circumstances.
no. copyright has a rather limited scope that excludes the aspects of design you most want to copy; patents must be applied for and received; and both expire
Same difference. At some point you're just arguing about what the number was. I don't care about the broader argument, but the right to buy $1MM of private shares is, in fact, real consideration.
Is it real consideration that anyone could consider to be worth "all the IP that you happen to be able to see while on this tour", or is it real consideration that Xerox thought was worth "an opportunity to see how we run the best tech lab of our generation"?
Don't forget that Apple presumably got paid $1M dollars out of the deal in addition to the tour. I'm having a hard time seeing the argument that the right to pay Apple for some of their shares in 1979 was perceived as being worth any of Xerox PARC's IP, much less "as much as you can carry in your head".
(None of which is to say that Apple was wrong to copy what they could, morally or legally. I just find the argument that these shares are evidence that it was an above-board trade that Xerox was on board with to be very weird.)
I don't care; as far as I'm concerned, that argument is isomorphic to "would $1MM literal dollars be enough for what they saw, or should the number be higher". Maybe. But the right to buy shares is not really a meaningful distinction to the simple issuance of shares in this historical context. That's all I'm arguing.
Options and RSUs are both universally acknowledged as consideration. That's all I'm arguing. Should it have been $1MM in stock, or $50MM, or $200k? Hell if I know.
It was 100% an above-board trade. Xerox at that point had poured an ocean of money into PARC and hadn't really seen any return on it. I don't think they would have seen it as an IP transfer, because it wasn't. Apple didn't rush out to implement Smalltalk. Instead they were inspired by the principles, misunderstood some stuff, and came up with something 100% better for the average consumer.
Xerox wasn't stupid—they were trying to get some value out of this research lab that was, on paper, lighting money on fire.
Was it only for the tour? Was it actually $1M, or did it later increase in value? Did Xerox value a strategic relationship? "A whole load of ideas" seems worth more than $1M to me, especially if you're Xerox back then.
Thank you for that. I was going to post something similar.
What the Apple engineers did was take obvious inspiration from what they saw at PARC but then ended up going in a different direction when they actually had to both implement it and make it workable as an OS. The overlapping windows is the most oft-cited innovation they came up with but there were many other perhaps more subtle ones.
The impression I have though is then that Gates basically copied Apple engineering, not PARC.
Your version makes it sound like Apple gave Xerox $1M in stock in exchange for the visit. Most sources I can find don't mention the stock at all, but the one that does [0] makes it pretty clear that the offer was to let Xerox buy stock from Apple pre-IPO in exchange for the tour, which is a very different story:
> Jobs's company stood on the precipice of a public offering guaranteed to make him and any investors wealthy, and the tech guru's impending good fortune enticed the suits at Xerox to make him an offer he couldn't refuse: Let us buy shares in your company, and we'll give you a peek inside the greatest minds in your field.
There was no explicit trade of stock for tour. The investment by Xerox in Apple happened before such a tour, for entirely separate reasons. There was another Apple exec who was managing pre-IPO external investor interest. There isn't a recorded reason for why Apple chose Xerox (among other investors), if I remember correctly.
However, Steve did leverage the fact that Xerox was an investor to bully the on-site engineers into providing him with the "executive" demo, after receiving the run-of-the-mill public demo and learning that a higher-tier demo existed. It involved a phone call to east coast Xerox Corporate, who instructed the on-site engineers to provide the full demo. The PARC lab director was OOO that day, and later said in an interview that he would have stonewalled Job's request.
Another fun fact, Xerox sold (the majority of?) their stake in Apple almost immediately for a quick turnaround profit post-IPO. Obviously there's no recorded reason for that trade, but my impression is that they didn't think Apple had what it takes to build a proper OS (they envied their ability to cheaply assemble hardware, but viewed their software suite/R&D as a big moat).
Edit: also, Apple engineers were already mid-working on replicating PARC tech at the time of the (not-so-) "fateful" demo. It was behind schedule and not-demoable, and Steve was getting frustrated with these facts. They encouraged Steve to visit PARC to get a preview/demo of what they were building, to ground him to their works' value. There were already a handful of ex-PARC people at Apple for a while, at this point, and PARC's work stems from "The Mother of All Demos" given decades ago. The Alto was unique in its early implementation, but not in its ideas.
This quote like many others are funny because people pretend that they can exactly remember things said decades earlier. Andy Hertzfeld later updated this entry on his website:
"....Here is Mike Boich's recollection of the 'Xerox' story, which goes a little differently, and is likely to be more faithful than mine: The meeting was one of the quarterly meetings, where Steve, Mike Murray, Belleville, you and I all got together with the Microsoft crew, which at was usually Bill, Jeff Harbers, Jon Shirley, and sometimes Neil and/or Charles Simonyi. I don't recall whether Windows had been announced, or we were just concerned about it, but Steve was trying to convince Bill that having a "Chinese wall between the Windows implementers and the Mac implementors wasn't sufficient for us to work well together. He was trying to get them to forget about the OS business, since the applications business would be much bigger total dollars. He said, "It's not that I don't trust you, but my team doesn't trust you. It's kind of like if your brother was beating up on my brother, people wouldn't say it was just your brother against my brother, they would say the Gates are fighting with the Jobs." Bill responded that "No Steve, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and you went in to steal the TV, and found that somebody else had stolen it. So you say, "hey, that's not fair. I wanted to steal the TV"."
It's also a lesson that always seems to fail to be learned. Xerox had the capital to set up a research arm, then failed to convert on any ideas because they were too focused on their current cash-cow. They eventually transitioned to "document company" where a document wasn't only paper, but it was too little/late.
xerox parc in the 70s invented the laser printer. the laser printer has been almost all of xerox's business since last millennium. their current revenues are 7 billion dollars a year, almost entirely from laser printers (mostly in disguise.) so i'm not sure it was 'too little, too late' or even 'failing to convert'
(right now i think xerox is unprofitable, but that's an issue of profit margins and management, not an issue of not having revenue)
> From a purely economic standpoint, Xerox’s investment in PARC for its first decade was returned with interest by the profits from the laser printer.
and that was in 01985
you could posit an alternative history where xerox wasn't just making billions of dollars a year, for generations, out of laser printers, but also owned the entire market of laser printers, semiconductor foundries, guis with overlapping windows, ethernet, wysiwyg document editing, page description languages, and object-oriented programming, because all of those were indeed invented at parc
the article does in fact implicitly posit that alternative history. but it isn't clear that it was ever a possible history. centrally planned economies are not good at innovation; decentralized ones are. the most significant invention on that list, the semiconductor foundry, isn't even technical; it's a business structure that decentralizes chip design
very possibly they've made more money from their early stock in apple than they ever could have made by trying to exclude everyone else from the overlapping-window-gui market
The way I read this is that it's like how Microsoft missed out on mobile even after making Windows Phone by underestimating just how important it was as a future market.
I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of Microsoft trouncing others?
I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public domain).
I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem" because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although that's a different problem.
I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS, though, which is most likely a failure of my memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.
> ... they steal from others and trounce others for stealing from them.
Explain how the antitrust case or its conclusion proves the quote above?
Mozilla/Netscape had a browser that could have competed with Microsoft, they didn't litigate them for stealing. The antitrust case was about it being effectively impossible to overthrow their monopoly because of the platform being locked down.
The current crop of litigation against Apple reeks more of the Microsoft antitrust case than any Disney cases.
> In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”