Steve Jobs talks about what he saw and he missed at Xerox PARC

Let's consider two academics. Academic A is constrained to traditional rational discourse and Academic B is constrained to post-modernism. Which of these two is going to publish more articles? The person that must meticulously build on prior research, or the person who can publish non-falsifiable articles with no chance of collision with prior work? Which of these two is going to get more grants for their institutions? Which of these two is going to get promoted and get tenure? Which of these is going to be in charge of advising the next generation of graduate students? Consider Steve Jobs answer to why Xerox failed and meditate on the implications in higher education: [VIDEO] Or consider this scene from Mad Men: [LINK] Different industry, same phenomenon. Pursuit of truth and a notion of objective reality constrains discourse to a very limited band of possible outcomes, let alone actual outcomes. If you remove those constraints, the floodgates open and the signal will immediately be drowned by intentional noise. And if you don't play ball, your institutions will inevitably replace you with someone who will.

* On the software side, Big Mac's vision of Unix with Macintosh on top is familiar from NeXT and OS X. It was also roughly paralleled by many other projects, from Pink/Taligent and BeOS to OS/2 and WinNT. But it's worth asking where Jobs and the other Big Mac supporters got the idea from in turn. One obvious source of inspiration for the NeXT work was Xerox PARC, and Jobs seems to have been acknowledging (or claiming) that influence in the famous clip from the 1995 Triumph of the Nerds "lost" interview where he talked about not understanding the importance of PARC's networking or OO work originally [LINK] [VIDEO] . Furthermore Alan Kay had just joined Apple in 1984 [LINK] . But there were plenty of other, very immediate possible inspirations for Big Mac in the commercial workstation market. There was high-end stuff like Apollo/Domain [LINK] or Lisp machines, but above all there was Sun. By 1983 the Sun-2 workstations had proven that you could already get a real Unix running on a desktop machine, using the same m68k architecture family as the Mac, that you could put a PARCish GUI on top of it [LINK] and that you could make money selling it. And on the other hand Sun's high prices and gimcrack user experience would have bred confidence that Apple could do much better, at least with a couple more years for prices to decline. I can't think of anything to confirm that Sun was an influence, but it more or less has to have been. * What about the networking, though? (Apart from all o

Apple took resizable overlapping windows from Xerox; in return, Xerox got shares in Apple. Not stole: bought , with stock. Then, on the Lisa, Apple invented from scratch : Standarised dialog boxes; a global menu bar; window title bars with global controls on them; standardised icons and functions and buttons (OK, Cancel, etc). None of this stuff was in Xerox Smalltalk. Xerox invented 3 things: overlapping resizable windows; an object-oriented programming language to create and manipulate them; ubiquitous networking to connect the machines. Apple took the windows, missed the rest. Source: Steve Jobs. [VIDEO] But Apple invented most of the standard GUI controls that we all know and use today. They weren't in the original Xerox system at all.