Fumbling the future
by Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander · first published 1999
50% recommend33% neutral17% critical
Why HN recommends it
Narrative history of Xerox PARC's invention of the personal computer and why the company failed to commercialize it. It examines how large firms can fumble ideas they already have.
Common criticism: Some find it inaccurate and reads like a business school case study
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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…to your vision and not ship it, it seems like it is impossible to build something that is close to your vision and then ship something only half as close as that. But that is where the success can be. "Fumbling the Future" [1] is a fascinating read for that reason. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...
on “Meet Microsoft, the world's best kept R&D secret” ↗…like). Look up the history of Xerox's "Palo Also Research Center (PARC). The Smallalk VM was the foundation of Self, and the later Java VM, with the addition of a couple decades of further work. See "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander for that story, published in 1988, nearly three decades ago. The cultural failures and non-response…
on “Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?” ↗…multi-billion-dollar company and didn't want to "waste time" on a product that at the time had a very small potential market. That's how Alan Kay sums up the history, anyways. There's a much more complete account in Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...
on “Steve Wozniak: How I Invented the Personal Computer (Video)” ↗…copyright but the case was dismissed since the statute of limitations had expired. What Xerox did and didn't do when it mattered (before this) is well described by the title of a book and the book itself: Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...)
on “Thank you Xerox (for not Patenting the GUI)” ↗…sell UNIX(TM) for serious money prior to the United States v. AT&T 1982 consent decree ... which I notice is the same year UNIX System III was released. Xerox, though ... well, a good book on that is Fumbling the Future: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp... ... which is still in print after it's 1988 debut. That isn't even an example of disruptive innovations almost never happening in established…
on “Tales of an Ex–Microsoft Manager” ↗I enjoyed reading "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer"[0]. At the end of the first half of the book, you wonder how anything can stop Xerox. In the second half, you learn how Xerox can stop…
on “Xerox calls off $6.1B sale to Fujifilm” ↗Xerox and the personal computer at the level of what became engineering workstations. The book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer covers this fairly well as I remember.
on “Steve Singh stepping down as Docker CEO” ↗…Engineering research teams are notorious for being both ungovernable and spending so much time "understanding" their ideas that they miss the market window. The canonical book on the subject for me was "Fumbling the Future" which talked about Xerox PARC, I worked in Sun Labs ("where good ideas go to die"), hired people out of Microsoft's BARC (Bay Area Research Center), and worked in IBM's Watson group which pulled a bunch…
on “Google DeepMind” ↗First published in 1985? For more reading: Fumbling the Future: not all that good; reads like a B-school case study Dealers of Lightning: excellent history Inventing the Future (by me!): what it was actually like to be there in the trenches. Fictionalized, but…
on “Xerox PARC’s engineers on how they invented the future and Xerox lost it (1985)” ↗This reminds me that I've been meaning to read Fumbling the Future: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ $3.03 for the Kindle edition! How can I turn that down? (And yes, I do note the irony of this being an Amazon link.)
on “The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing (2017)” ↗…after TSOANM. Unlike Kidder, I was actually part of it. One of the reviews compares it to TSOANM, so I guess that's high praise. Since there are already at least two non-fiction books about all that (Fumbling the Future and Dealers of Lightning) I wrote this like it was fiction, meaning with characters who get to do things and talk to each other, and don't know how it all turns out. Nearly all the players who are still…
on “Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder” ↗…Google's unwillingness/inability to productionize these systems is keeping them back. It seems like the issue is only with the management, and I'll be looking forward to reading about Google's version of Fumbling the Future[0]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Com...
on “Google trained Bard on ChatGPT chats from ShareGPT” ↗…and a very complex and confused jumping around timeline (I had trouble myself orienting in some of the spots). But it also has a lot of good stories, of which a reasonable number are "true enough". "Fumbling The Future" is extremely inaccurate.
on “Larry Tesler Has Died” ↗Yeah, just finished that one (Dream Machine) myself, excellent book. The other main one I know of is Dealers of Lightning, which centres on PARC specifically. Also quite a good book. Another is Fumbling the Future, which discuss the apparent failure of Xerox to capitalise on their computing research (as you'll know from having read the Dream Machine, the reality is a bit more nuanced than that). Haven't read this…
on “The Joy of Computer History Books” ↗Yeah. SDS (later XDS) was bought up by Xerox just before Xerox launched PARC. In the "Fumbling the Future" book, there's several pages describing how PARC has to constantly push back against corporate who were trying to fold it (PARC) into SDS. I wrote my first Lisp program on a 940 back in the 70s. IIRC,…
on “The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Will Join SRI International” ↗