Having just finished the Steve Jobs bio, and so freshly reminded of how Apple borrowed the idea of the graphical user interface from Xerox to great effect (only to later turn around and call Microsoft a thief for doing the same), I enjoyed this back and forth on Xerox. It’s a piece of an extremely long Q&A between Felix Salmon and Jonah Peretti about… everything.
JP: The thing is, if you care about having an impact on the world, the too-early mode is the highest leverage point because you can have an idea, build a mock or a prototype of it, and then have those ideas find themselves in products that other people build that then scale up to massive.
FS: You’d rather be Xerox than Apple?
JP: People always talk about Xerox as a sad story.
FS: Maybe.
JP: I mean some people do. If all you value is money, then it’s a sad story. But if you think that the graphical user interface is a cool thing and you worked on the graphical user interface at Xerox, you can feel like, “This has a big impact on the world.”
FS: It’s a way of looking at the world through a lens of capital rather than labor. I’m sure the people who invented the graphical user interface at Xerox are doing very well for themselves right now.
JP: Right. And some of them have a sense of personal satisfaction that they had a big impact, even if they didn’t profit from it at the scale that they could have.
The history of the tech industry is full of case studies where we ask why some once great company couldn’t capitalize on a breakthrough it had created. It’s a fascinating question, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a question for firms more than it is for people. It’s easy to see why a firm would want to capture some of the financial value of a breakthrough, but for many people that’s not necessarily the goal. Sure, some great technologists truly are motivated by getting their innovations into as many hands as possible. But not all of them.
Sometimes, as Peretti says, the true impact gets made by the innovators who are too early, while the riches go to those who follow later. For lots of people, it’s the impact that matters.
beyond the times 