Innovation is a walk in the PARC for Xerox
“Inventions are not innovations until they delight our customers. Over the past years, Xerox has focused its extensive RD&E efforts to deliver breakthrough innovations, which have been embedded in products and services generating billions of dollars in recurring revenue for the company,” said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group. “Last year Xerox brought 39 new products and services to market. As importantly, our inventors have laid the groundwork for many more, some of which will expand our reach into new industries.”
It was reported today that some 584 U.S. utility patents were granted to Xerox in 2007, adding to its extensive intellectual property portfolio. According to a press release, "many of the patents are already fueling new technologies embedded in products and services Xerox brought to market within the last year, while others provide the foundation for the next generation of products, services and software." The total includes patents awarded to the Palo Alto Research Center, a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation.
Among the earliest breakthroughs by PARC were these innovation milestones that date back to 1973, for example:
- Personal distributed computing is invented. PARC's vision of computers as tools that could help people work together will change the course of the computer industry and lead to new ways of organizing interactions to support both individual and collaborative work.
- Client/server architecture is invented. This development makes the paradigm shift of moving the computer industry away from the hierarchical world of centralized mainframes - that download to dumb terminals - towards more distributed access to information resources.
- The Alto personal computer becomes operational. As it evolves, the Alto will feature the world's first What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor, a commercial mouse for input, a graphical user interface (GUI), and bit-mapped display, and will offer menus and icons, link to a local area network and store files simultaneously. The Alto will provide the foundation for Xerox's STAR 8010 Information System.
- A patent memo describing a new networking system uses the term "Ethernet" for the first time. A few months later, an entry about Ethernet in a researcher's lab notebook reads: "It works!" This new protocol for multiple computers communicating over a single cable will spawn a series of sophisticated networking protocols enabling distributed computing and re-architecting of the internal computer-to-computer communication within Xerox copiers and duplicators. Ethernet will become a global standard for interconnecting computers on local-area networks.
- The first laser printer, called EARS (for Ethernet-Alto research character generator scanning laser output terminal) is in service, printing documents at 1 page/second at 384 spots per inch (spi). It will be the foundation for the Xerox 9700 Electronic Printing System and Xerox's printing business.
Whether or not this new idea -- "Inventions are not innovations until they delight our customers." -- ever replaces "obviousness" as a legal test for patent approval, it's a heck of a pull quote from a press release reminding us of the innovations of PARC that we might otherwise take for granted.
