Page Text: April 15, 2022 at 9:29 am
}}} When you’re running a large organization, you’re not seeing reality. It’s like you’re watching a movie in which you get to see maybe one out of every thousand frames, and from that, you have to figure out what’s really going on.
Indeed, this is the main issue with hierarchical organizations, e.g., bureaucracies, aka “Feudal Enclaves” and “Corporate Organizations”. It is anathema to an Information Society, as it means critical information can be blocked by a single failure to forward it around the tree. This can be both accidental, in someone in the decision tree failing to read, or perhaps, to grasp its importance through lacking context, but also through malice, in both corporate jealousies and “Mine! Mine!” ownership behaviors.
An information organization needs to have a more networked flow of data, encouraging all who can use the data to be at least able to become aware of it.
We have yet to really see such an organization which I am aware of in anything larger than a small group of people — once a business gets large enough to have a true bureaucracy, it builds on the bureaucracy rather than haring off in a newer model idea. I suggest we, as a society, need to push this notion forwards. There needs to be more experimentation with org structures going forwards, to a more networked model.
April 15, 2022 at 12:46 pm
once a business gets large enough to have a true bureaucracy, it builds on the bureaucracy rather than haring off in a newer model idea.
My comment may be out of date per recent changes but 3M seemed to handle this issue pretty well.
The classic example of failure is Xerox that had the PARC geniuses in house and told them to quit messing around with computers and get back to working on copiers.
Kirk
April 15, 2022 at 2:12 pm
I’ve been railing on this for years, if anyone has noticed.
The current regime we have going stresses artificialities that do not actually ever get feedback from reality. We test, we select, we train/indoctrinate the young, and never, ever subject them to actual feedback from a real environment. Until their feet hit the road out in a corporate or government hierarchy, where they’re also insulated from real-world consequence, they never get feedback. It’s all basically simulations, and those simulations and proxies grow increasingly remote from actual practice and reality as it is known out in that horrid place, “the real world”.
Doubt me? Look at the recent kerfuffle over the Washington Post seeking “correspondents in deepest Redlandia”. The system has tested, selected, inculcated, and put in charge all these people who don’t really know anything at all, let alone about their own country. Any wonder they’re bewildered to learn that their jejeune imaginings are not true, or that they’re currently in the depths of a cognitive dissonance for the ages?
We’re doing this wrong, people. We have been, for quite some time. I would estimate that we’ve been on the wrong track since at least the 1900s, when Wilson got academia a foothold in governance. And, if you want to trace the rot further back, consider just how it is that academia has gotten so damn distanced from the real world of truths and consequences for getting those truths wrong?
I respect knowledge and scholarship, utterly. What I contest is the question of whether there’s been all that much value in most of what the world of academia has gotten itself up to, over these last many generations. We’ve now got “Professors of English” who think that grammar and writing are formless things, unnecessary and products of “colonial thinking”… What does that tell us of the system that created these credentialed dolts?
I would hold that the system we’ve got going requires drastic change, and that the people the existing system has vomited forth to serve as our “elite leadership” needs either a drastic reform, or utter destruction if our society is to survive.
I’ll tell you one damn thing–I’m sick to death of the mockery and disdain these “educated-yet-idiot” types put on display, whenever they discuss “flyover country” and their rural brethren. Whatever may be said about the lack of sophistication in the hinterlands of this nation of ours, at the least…? We don’t allow people to defecate in public on our streets and sidewalks, and you can safely walk in the parks our taxes pay for.
For now. God help us if the idiots-in-charge ever get the power to change that, because I think that will be the match that lights the conflagration of outright civil war.
April 15, 2022 at 2:30 pm
Mike K….”The classic example of failure is Xerox that had the PARC geniuses in house and told them to quit messing around with computers and get back to working on copiers.”
My understanding of the Xerox story is different. Great technology was developed at Xerox PARC, but they never had a good approach as to *how to sell it*. Most copier salesmen, in that era, would be unlikely to be able to sell such a product effectively.
If PARC had been organized as a *business venture* rather than an R&D center, I think history would have likely been different. PARC could have established its own sales force to sell the advanced computers, or they could have taken an indirect-channel approach, say with selected dealers.
In general, I think many new-product efforts in established companies fail because of a nonviable sales approach. Even when an existing sales force is perfectly competent to sell a new product line, they likely will not if the payoff (in terms of sales difficulty vs revenue) is less-attractive than that for their existing products. There is also the issue of *risk*, fear that the new product may not work right and may thus screw up their customer relationships.
Gavin Longmuir
April 15, 2022 at 2:45 pm
Mike KL “… quit messing around with computers and get back to working on copiers.”
I understand the situation with Xerox was worse than that. At least focusing on copiers might have been playing to their strengths. Instead, Xerox diverted efforts from computers to … typewriters! Maybe there was something in the air at that time, because Exxon also tried to diversify out of the oil & gas industry into … typewriters!
But the efforts of the geniuses at Xerox PARC bore fruit all the same. Apparently, a young guy called Steve Jobs was visiting one day, saw something stuck up on a shelf, and asked what it was. So they demonstrated the small computer with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a mouse for him. The rest, as they say, is history.
Kirk
April 15, 2022 at 3:01 pm
Y’all badly need to read Christian Sandström on these things. Xerox made the deliberate decision to use PARC more as a showpiece than what it should have been, an incubator for new technologies. The corporate geniuses running Xerox basically made a habit of showing off PARC as some sort of circus attraction, and never thought much about “what comes after photocopying” and the future of the company. Xerox could well have dominated the personal computer age, but they didn’t have the necessary imagination or foresight to do so.
Final analysis? Same problem with them that you see in every major “settled hierarchy”. They get fat and happy, then quit innovating, thinking that all they need to do is tread water. In a competitive traditional market economy, this is a death sentence. But, with the “creative destruction” of that sort of economy, what winds up happening is a succession of organizations taking over as the sclerotic and complacent go out of business.
You’ll note the utter lack of market pressure to provide correctives in our governance.
MCS
April 15, 2022 at 4:19 pm
What all the stories about Xerox’s missed opportunity leave out is what one of those computers would have cost at that time. Remember the Lisa cost $10,000 several years later. When the Mac came out, I think it cost around $4,000 with a dot matrix printer and after a major effort to get a usable system into only 128K. At that, you had to buy a Lisa if you wanted to write any program for it.. At the time Jobs saw the PARK system, I imagine it would have cost closer to $20,000, without software that didn’t exist, memory was expensive. That would have taken some sort of super salesman. Writing software probably would have required a minicomputer. I think that the 3270 terminal emulator was the biggest application on genuine IBM PC’s for years.
Kirk
April 15, 2022 at 4:35 pm
Create the product, then the demand follows. What was the “killer app” for the original Apple II? VisiCalc.
Xerox could have done that, easily. They were like Moses getting to the Promised Land, and then never seeing it.
Jobs and Gates both went to PARC, recognized that they’d seen the future and then went on to create it. XEROX executives went to PARC, if they bothered, and saw a corporate vanity project. They never actually expended the resources to try to bring it to market, even after they should have seen the potential from the early days of those cowboy computer-builders of the Homebrew Computer Club.
It wasn’t just the executives at XEROX, either–There were interviews I’ve seen with the actual researchers at PARC who were convinced that they were doing things that were generations ahead of what was then currently possible. Some didn’t see it that way, and wound up getting headhunted by Jobs and Gates both.
It’s a fascinating study in how entrenched hierarchy fails in the face of changing conditions. XEROX had the potential to dominate, just like Sears had the potential to dominate, but both companies got to the very doors of the new world before them, and utterly failed to recognize that they were there. Amazon should have been throttled in its bed by Sears, but instead? What happened? The Wiley Coyote soooper-genious types at Sears chose to shut down the catalog side of their enterprise despite executives pointing out things like QVC and the potential of the then-nascent Internet and/or BBS systems. One guy I talked to about this told me that there were executives at Sears who were talking about creating a private, nation-wide BBS system for home sales of Sears products and even things like real-time monitoring of Sears appliance products. One guy wanted Kenmore appliances to be able to self-diagnose and then call in for repair, without anyone intervening…
One guess as to what happened with all of those initiatives, and the career prospects of the guys proposing them.
April 15, 2022 at 5:57 pm
MCS…”What all the stories about Xerox’s missed opportunity leave out is what one of those computers would have cost at that time.” But a Xerox computer product couldn’t have been launched at that time, anyhow. Design for volume production, putting manufacturing in place, upgrading the software to commercial status, writing documentation, etc…would have surely taken a few years, by which time prices of some components would have predictably come down. Apple launched Mac about 5 years after the Jobs PARC visit.
One alternative would have been develop and market a PARC product not as a consumer item, but as a more-expensive product targeted at certain vertical applications…publishing, for example, where Macs did take hold after some upgrading.
April 15, 2022 at 6:32 pm
PARC was more than the GUI. It was adobe acrobat, photoshop, ethernet and a bunch of others. Any one of those was a product that built a company and then an industry.
I worked at Sears when I was in college and saw how incredibly bad their management was. I have a number of stories about it. They closed the catalog sales the year Amazon began selling books.
MCS
April 15, 2022 at 7:57 pm
“Create the product, then the demand follows. What was the “killer app” for the original Apple II? VisiCalc.”
That sounds good as long as you’re talking about your money and not mine, the tricky part is not to run out before the customers realize how much they need your “killer app”. VisiCalc ran on computers that cost about $1,000. Lotus 123 sold a lot of PC compatibles that quickly declined in price to around the same level without benefit of any “wimp”. Apple had several near death experiences living of about 5-10% of the market for many years.
You can make a long list of all the big companies that jumped on the personal computer in different ways that aren’t around. Xerox has survived.
I read a long, detailed account of the development of the Mac. I don’t think it would have taken Xerox nearly as long which was probably their biggest problem. The bill of materials in 1980 would have beer high four figures at least. They would have burned through a lot of money waiting for Moore’s law to bring the price down and all the other pieces to fall into place. With macs, you could, by the later part of the ’80’s, produce a usable type setting system for around $15,000 which was clear out of the range of the home market but was dirt cheap compared to commercial systems that started at ten times that and had interfaces only a Linotype operator could love.
The case for them completely missing the laser printer market is much clearer.
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