[quote=svelte]When the Apple Heads start preaching to me about how Microsoft stole the GUI for Windows from Apple, I always remind them that Apple stole it from Xerox PARC. They usually get quiet after that.

But even so, you have to give Jobs and Woz credit for taking the Xerox prototype, productionizing it, and distributing it to the masses.

The Apple IIe, the original one-box Mac, and the iPhone all leveraged emerging concepts and put each of them into an extremely well thought out product that the average person could afford.

I too remember when each of them came out and there was nothing else even close to their abilities on the market when they arrived. Apple had vision, while other companies in the same field struggled to get more rudimentary products out the door.

Basically as consumers, we have two paths to follow: we can take the closed-system proprietary approach that Apple offers (pro: reliability con: high cost, sw selection) or the open system approach that the PC platform provides (pro: lost cost, great sw selection, con: reliability). You can see this repeated in the smart phone arena, with the proprietary iPhone and the open system Android. Neither choice is wrong, it’s simply a matter of what is more important to you.[/quote]

Svelte: Jobs “stole it” from PARC? No, that isn’t true. Xerox (and Motorola) had developed quite a bit of the technology that went into the Apple systems (and later IBM systems), but were more than content to simply let it go, largely because it didn’t fit their “core competency” (in Xerox’s case, xerography).

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a virtual hotbed of innovation in those days, especially with all of the DoD and DARPA money flowing in, and their proximity to Stanford University. I grew up right down the road from PARC, my dad (who was a defense aerospace engineer for Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto) spent quite a lot of time there and would report on all of the new technology that was being spun off.

Steve Jobs was a visionary who was far ahead of his time and there was stunned amazement when Scully pushed him out of Apple in 1985. By Scully’s own admission, this was a huge mistake and I don’t doubt Apple would have probably folded if Jobs hadn’t returned in 1997 to revive their fortunes. For anyone who grew up there in those days and can recall Jobs and Wozniak hanging out at the Byte Shop in Mountain View, there was an incredible energy in the air. They were mavericks and truly did reshape the American technology landscape.

Companies like Xerox and Motorola and Amdahl and Wang were slow moving behemoths in comparison and lacked the vision and the will to take the necessary risks that true innovation demands.