Nice post there. There's definitely a lot of 20/20 hindsight that people apply to PARC's history with respect to computing.

It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.

Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.

Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.

Yeah, I've been in touch with Dr. Chesborough and I went over some of his stuff in writing this:

https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

Butler Lampson quoted some Xerox executive at the time as saying, "We don't want to be a holding company!"

Nonetheless. Damn, WHAT a holding company!

Thanks, interesting read. I guess the decision to sell all of those 100,00 shares at the Apple IPO was a pretty expensive blunder.