Xerox Raid

In 1979, a young Steve Jobs visited the Xerox PARC research center in Palo Alto. He was given a tour of their latest projects and saw something that made him jump around the room shouting, "Why aren't you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!" What he saw was the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the mouse.



"The Xerox Raid" is the tragic business case study of Xerox, a company that invented the personal computer, the laser printer, Ethernet, and the mouse, but failed to monetize any of it because their leadership was obsessed with selling more photocopiers. They literally gave away the keys to the digital kingdom to Apple and Microsoft for pennies.



This book explores the "fumble of the future." It analyzes how corporate bureaucracy stifles innovation and why being the first to invent something is useless if you don't have the vision to sell it. It is a warning to all market leaders: the thing that will kill you is probably already in your R&D lab, gathering dust.



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