Apple, Xerox, IBM, And Fumbling The Future

Thirty-five years ago, Apple introduced a computer that changed the way people communicated with their electronic devices, using graphical icons and visual indicators instead of punched cards or text-based commands.

On January 19, 1983, Apple introduced Lisa, a $ 9,995 PC for business users. Many of its innovations, such as the graphical user interface, the mouse and document-centric computing, were taken from the Alto computer developed in Xerox PARC, presented as the Xerox Star of $ 16,595 in 1981.

Steve Jobs recalled (in Steve Jobs of Walter Isaacson) that he and the team Lisa were very relieved when they saw the Xerox Star: "We knew that they had not done well and that we could do it, at a fraction of the price". Isaacson says that "Apple's attack on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the industry's chronicles" and quotes Jobs on the subject: "Picasso had a saying: 'good artists copy, great artists steal 'and we've always been shameless about stealing big ideas ... They [the Xerox management] were copier bosses who had no idea what a computer could do ... Xerox could have owned the entire industry of computer science ".

The story of how Xerox invented the future but did not realize that it has become a popular urban legend in technology circles, especially after the 1998 publication of Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Staff DK Computer Smith and R.C. Alexander. Moshe Vardi, former chief editor of Communications at the ACM (CACM), recounted his own history of the future awkward years ago, as a member of an IBM research team in 1989 that produced a report that provided for "information." -technology enabled for the future of the 21st century. "

The IBM report matched some of the implications of its vision of a "multimedia utility similar to global videotext." For example, he predicted a lower need for travel agents, an avalanche of valueless information and how "rapid dissemination." Information through a global information utility "will increase the volatility of politics, diplomacy and" other aspects of life ".

Vardi also brought to the attention of his readers a video about the future produced by AT & T in 1993 "with a fairly clear vision of the future, predicting what was then a revolutionary technology, like paying tolls without stopping and reading books on computers" .

What can we learn from these futures of yesterday? Vardi correctly concluded that "the future seems clear only in retrospect." It is easy enough to practically look at it and not see it, it follows that those who made the future happen deserve double and triple credit.They not only saw the future, but also relied on his vision to move forward, and translated the vision into execution. "

But what exactly is it that those who "lost the future" did not see? More importantly, what do we need to understand now about how their future has evolved?

The IBM report and the AT & T video seem prophetic today, but they repeated many predictions that were made years before 1989 and 1993. These predictions eventually came true, but it is how we got there that these descriptions of the future were lost. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll, if you know where you are heading, it matters a lot the way you take.

The IBM report says: "In a sense, the proposed vision may not seem revolutionary: the planned system could be discarded as a predictable safe extrapolation and a merger of existing information tools that can complement or even replace." I would argue that the vision, both for IBM and AT & T, was not only an "extrapolation of existing information tools", but also an extrapolation of their existing businesses: what they wanted the future to be. His vision was based on the following assumptions:

•     The business / enterprise market will be the first to adopt and use the global information utility; the consumer / household market will follow. IBM: "The private consumer market is probably the last to join the system due to the still unclear needs of such services and the high initial costs involved." And: "An important vehicle to stimulate the development of home applications will be commercial applications"

•     The global information utility will consist of a "global communications network" and "information services" that will be installed at the top. It will be expensive to build and the performance and availability requirements will be very high. IBM: "Once an information utility is intended to be used and depends on a 'multimedia phone' system, it must comply with the RAS [reliability, availability and serviceability] requirements of the telephone system, which go much further beyond the majority of today's information systems. "And:" Without 24-hour availability and under MTTR [mean time to repair / restore] figures, no subscriber will want to rely on such utility ".

•     The information will come from centralized databases developed by established information providers (companies) and will be sent through the network to users when they request it on a "pay per use" basis.

When Vardi wrote that "it is practically easy to look [the future] and not see it", it probably referred to the Internet, which undoubtedly all the authors of the IBM report were familiar (in 1989, a period of 20 years). -see an open network connecting academic institutions, government agencies and some large corporations). But neither IBM nor AT & T (or other established IT companies) cared much about it because it was not "robust" enough and did not meet the business-level requirements of its existing customers. Also, they did not control it, since they controlled their own private networks.

Now, before saying "innovator's dilemma," let me remind you (and Professor Christensen) that there were many innovators outside of the IT companies established in the 1980s and early 1990s that pursued the vision articulated so beautifully in the IBM report. The most prominent, and for a time, successful examples were CompuServe and AOL. A third, Prodigy, was a joint venture between IBM, CBS and Sears.

So, in fact, even established players were trying to innovate on this line and even followed Christensen's advice (which he gave a decade later) that they should do so outside of their "asphyxiating" corporate walls. Another innovator, previously successful and very successful in the future, who followed the same vision, was the aforementioned Steve Jobs, who launched in 1988 his biggest flaw, the NeXT workstation (the IBM report talks about similar workstations to NeXT as the only device for accessing the global information utility, not to mention PCs, laptops or mobile phones).

The view of "we use-a-access-heavy-access-to-the-device-to-find-or-obtain-information-cost-from-centralized-databases-executing-at-the-top-of-a-world red-expensive "was thwarted by a man, Tim Berners-Lee, and his invention of 1989, the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee put the lipstick on the pig, illuminating with information the standardized, open, "not robust" and cheap Internet (which was, and still is, piggybacking on the "robust" global telephone network). The network and its specifications were absent from its vision, which focused on information, what the final results of the IBM and AT & T visions were, that is, providing people with an easy-to-use tool for creating, sharing and organize information. It turned out that the way to allow people to plan their own trip was not through an expensive pay-per-use information tool, but through a hypermedia browser and an open network only scientists (and other geeks like IBM researchers) they knew it in 1989.

The surprising thing is that the IBM researchers understood the importance of hypermedia well. The only computer company mentioned by name in the report is Apple and its Hypercard. IBM: "In the context of a global multimedia information tool, the concept of hypermedia becomes more important in the sense that global hypermedia links can be created to allow users to navigate and create new views and relationships from separate databases. and distributed A professional who writes a hyperdocument would incorporate direct hyperlinks to the works he intends to quote, instead of typing the references painfully.The "readers" could directly select these links and see the real things instead of having to search for them through The set of all the databases maintained online would thus form a hypernet of information in which the user's workstation would be a powerful window. "

Compare this with Tim Berners-Lee writing in Weaving the Web: "The research community has used links between documents printed by age: tables of contents, indexes, bibliographies and reference sections ... On the web ... scientists could escape from the sequential organization of each paper and bibliography, to choose and choose a path of references that serve their own interest. "There is no doubt that the future significance of hypermedia was a great idea of ​​the IBM researchers in 1989, including hints about Berners-Lee's breakthrough that was to escape (in his words) "the straitjacket of hierarchical documentation systems".

But it was Berners-Lee, not IBM, who successfully translated his vision into a viable product (or, more accurately, three standards that generated millions of successful products). Why? Because he looked at the future through different lenses from IBM (or AOL).

Berners-Lee's vision did not focus on the question of how information is delivered, the network, but on the question of how it is organized and shared. This, as it turned out, was the right way to make the visions of e-books a reality, an avalanche of valueless information and the elimination of all types of intermediaries. And because this path was taken by Berners-Lee and others, starting with Mosaic (the first successful browser), the information became free and its creation radically changed from large established media companies to "new media" individuals and small businesses. " Because this path was taken, IT innovation in the last thirty years has focused mainly on the consumer space, and the information services market has been oriented almost exclusively to the consumer.

I am intimately familiar with IBM-type visions of the late 1980s because I was developing similar ones for my employer at that time, Digital Equipment Corporation, most famous (within DEC) my 1989 report, "Computing in the 1990s " I predicted that the 1990s will lead to "a distributed network of data centers, servers and desktop devices, capable of providing adequate solutions (ie, mixing and combining various system and personnel configurations) with business problems and needs." " Believe me, this was quite visionary for people used to talk only about "systems". (My report was incorporated into the annual business plan for the VAX mini-computer line, the plan refers to them as "servers" for the first time).

In another report, on "Enterprise Integration", I wrote: "The successful integration of the business environment, together with a successful integration of the IT environment, can lead to data overload, with the destruction of both human and system access barriers , users can find themselves facing an overwhelming amount of data, without any means of classifying them and capturing only what they need at a particular time.It is the means of classifying the data that carry the potential of true Business Integration in the 1990s. "Not bad, so to speak, predicting Google when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still in high school.

And I was really prophetic in a series of presentations and reports in the early 1990s, arguing that the next digitization of all information (most of it was in analog form at that time), will erase what were then rigid boundaries between the computer, consumer electronics and media "industries".

But I never mentioned the Internet in any of these reports. Why pay attention to a dark network that I used sometimes to answer questions about my reports by some geeks in places with names like "Argonne National Laboratory", when Digital had at that time the largest private network in the world, Easynet, and more than 10,000 VAX Notes communities (electronic bulletins with which DEC employees, and authorized partners and clients and geeky friends collaborated and shared information)?

Of course, the only future possible was that of a large, expensive, global, multi-media, high-speed, robust network. Just like Easynet. Or IBM’s and AT&T’s private networks or the visions from other large companies of how the future of computing and telecommunications will be a nice and comforting extrapolation of their existing businesses.

 The exception to these visions of the future of computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the one produced by Apple in 1987, The Knowledge Navigator. It was also an extrapolation of the company's existing business, and because of that, it portrayed a different future.

In contrast to IBM and AT & T (and DEC), it focused on information and people, not on communication services and business enterprises. He had a university professor, directing his research work, researching data and collaborating with a remote colleague, assisted by an "intelligent agent" who spoke and knew everything. The global network was there in the background, but the emphasis was on navigating knowledge and a completely new way of interacting with computers simply by talking to them, as if they were human.

We have not arrived yet, but Steve Jobs and Apple approached us in 2007 by introducing a new (tactile) way to interact with computers, packed like telephones, which also turned out to be the perfect access devices, much better than NeXT workstations. to the global knowledge network, the Web.

Back in 1983, the Lisa failed to become a commercial success, the second of those consecutive failures for Apple. The innovative and visionary company almost loses control of the future. But then he found the right packaging, the right market and the right prices for his innovative man-computer interface: the Macintosh.