Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #683640 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
One of the great legends of the computer business is how a photocopier company invented the personal computer and then didn't know what to do with it. Unlike many such legends, this one is substantially true. Most of the computing technologies we take for granted today--from the windows-based graphical user interface to Ethernet and the laser printer--were all invented in the early 1970s by researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre. But although Xerox funded this amazing creative burst, the company proved unable to profit from it, and it was outfits like Apple, 3Com and Microsoft which brought the ideas of the PARC researchers to the market. Micheal Hiltzig's Dealers of Lightning is not the first attempt to explore the story of how a great corporation "fumbled the future", but it is the most comprehensive to date.

Although the book covers much of the corporate infighting and the interpersonal rivalries that surrounded the PARC enterprise, its main focus is on the achievements of the squad of brilliant researchers recruited by Bob Taylor, the manager of the PARC Computer Science Lab (and the man who had earlier conceived and funded the ARPANET while working for the Pentagon). It's a riveting story of remarkable intellectual triumphs, and a sobering reminder that managing people with such high IQs makes herding cats look easy. Several of the characters in the story have testified that Hiltzig's account is broadly accurate, even when his portrayal of them was not entirely complimentary--which suggests that he has got it about right. In an age when few people know how to manage creative people, Dealers of Lightning should be required reading for everyone who aspires to lead people smarter than themselves. --John Naughton

Business Week
A treat for anyone with even a passing interest in the origins of today's siliconized culture...read this book.

New York Times
For any student of business or technology, Dealers of Lightning offers a gem of a story that has never been so well told.

Customer Reviews

A good read about software history
This is a gripping history about key software innovations that underlie much current US economic success. These software technologies are now deeply embedded in everyday business practices and they formed a launching pad for today's computer-based communications and the Internet. As traditional US manufacturing declines in competitiveness, it is hard to imagine that the US would be enjoying its current prosperity if basic innovations like those developed by PARC and by early ARPA research had not occurred when they did.

As a technical participant in the Xerox Star commercialization effort, I worked with many of the PARC researchers described here. Hiltzik tells a very balanced and nuanced story that certainly captures the concepts, dynamics, and conflicts of that time. One can quibble with whether the participants' recollections are always fair, but Hiltzik's story about these exciting times is basically accurate with respect to the personalities and events that I knew, and he fills in a wealth of background and details that I didn't know.

This book corrects a lot of misinformation about PARC research and Xerox commercialization efforts. It is a good read for anybody interested in the history of technology. It should be required reading for everybody in research management--for many examples of what to do and what not to do. This history should also be read by anyone who believes another big leap in software technology can be achieved while research funding is cut back, universities are drained of their talent, and almost everyone competitively focuses on six month commercialization goals.

A gripping tale about historic computing research.
If you read only one book about research management, researchers, or computing research this year, this is the one to read.

Dealers of Lightning is the story of the seminal first 13 years of Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center, a period in which PARC developed laser printers, the ethernet, internets, networked personal computers, the client-server model, bitmap displays, icons and graphical user interfaces, the desktop metaphor and overlapping windows, and various other foundations of the computing world as we know it today. But this is not primarily a book about technology -- it is about the people who generated it: How they were brought together, how they interacted, and finally, how they dispersed.

Michael Hiltzik is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and he has clearly done his homework. He seems to have talked to all the major (and many of the minor) figures involved, read everything that has been written on the subject, and understood most of it. There are ample footnotes, source citations, glossary, and acknowledgements. Some of his accounts are as close to definitive as we are ever likely to see. For example, his story of the famous demos for Steve Jobs that had such an influence on the Lisa and the Macintosh (while recognizing that participants recollections conflict) has more information about them than I was able to gather while at PARC.

As an "unindicted co-conspirator," neither interviewed by Hiltzik, nor mentioned by name (although I was close to the epicenter for the last half of the book's time span), I have both inside information and personal biases. I spotted a few small factual errors, and in some cases my interpretation of events is different than Hiltzik's. Nevertheless, he has done an amazingly good job of capturing the gist. This book is more complete, more accurate, and more nuanced than Smith and Alexander's Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer.

Hiltzik is an excellent writer, and the book is a page-turner (even when you know how it ends). The plot is gripping; the cast of characters large and interesting. Parts of the book are too incredible to be published as fiction. I stayed up well past my bedtime three different nights, repeatedly promising myself I'd read "just one more chapter."

My main complaint is that the book is so crowded with people and events that almost all the characters come out one-dimensional, often associated with a single recurring tag phrase. Bob Taylor at least gets a two-dimensional treatment, but it is too often through the eyes of his (numerous) enemies; the admiration and loyalty he inspired in many others is frequently remarked on, but never explained.

The book is littered with insights about research and technology transfer -- both from the characters in the book and from Hiltzik. There are stimulating comments on what worked, and what did not, and why. Of course, I don't agree with all of them, but formulating convincing counter-arguments can be quite challenging and instructive.

I particularly recommend the Epilogue, "Did Xerox Blow It?" Unfortunately, it really needs to be read in the context of the entire book. I first tried reading it out of order, and it didn't have the same force.

Hiltzik discusses fairly even-handedly Steve Jobs's claim that "Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been, you know, a company ten times its size. Could have been IBM--could have been the IBM of the nineties. Could have been the Microsoft of the nineties." After weighing the pros and cons, Hiltzik concludes that it's not clear that Xerox could have ridden the tiger to that kind of success -- even if it had avoided all its known blunders.

Hiltzik also points out that laser printing alone repaid the cost of PARC many times over, and that no company can expect to exploit every worthwhile thing that comes out of a research laboratory.

LESSONS IN AVOIDING "STALLED" THINKING ABOUT INNOVATION
My vantage point on this book is as a consultant to Xerox during many of the years covered. As a result, I have a fair knowledge of the Xerox executives mentioned. Our firm also had one of the first five Star-based ethernet installations (along with the White House, Library of Congress, and the Pentagon). We were also hired in 1978 to forecast the future of the personal computer for a major corporation. From my perspective, Mr. Hiltzik has done a real service in dispelling some of the mythology that has started to surround PARC and what it all means. Any future work on PARC will be built, at least in part, on this excellent, thorough history. For those young people who think that Bill Gates is the inventor of the entire modern personal computer industry, this book will be a revelation. A good book to read along with this one is ORGANIZING GENIUS, because the PARC case seems to parallel those examples fairly closely in the key elements. Along with the other reviewers, I commend the Epilogue "Did Xerox Blow It?" to those who are thinking about advancing research and development in their own organizations. At another level, the book is filled with examples of the stalls that delay all human progress: Poor communications (Xerox executives often did not understand what PARC was doing); Misconception (many project directives were based on misunderstandings about the industry and Xerox technology); Disbelief (failing to appreciate the future implications of technology trends, such as the rapidly falling cost of memory); Bureaucracy (too many people involved, for no particularly good reason); Procrastination (delays in turning breakthrough technologies into products); and Ugly Ducklings (not taking the time to understand the implications of what PARC was doing). At the end, we should all feel fortunate that this wonderful work was done by PARC with Xerox's sponsorship, and that we are all benefiting from it today. I hope that someone will read this book, and build an improved model based on PARC for some other application and industry so that both humankind and the sponsor will both reap even greater rewards the next time such a remarkable effort comes together. You would be making a big mistake if you did not read this book, and learn from it. Getting better at innovating and deriving benefits from innovation are important for us all.