Err... no, it didn't. It was astonishingly fast as these things go. It was the very speed of development that made it hard to get organized properly and get everything to market in-house.

PARC was set up in 1970, and it took most of the decade (along with stuff going on at SRI) to figure out the main problems of distributed computing. The Alto was a prototype system built in 1973, but it was never meant for mass production, and the economics wouldn't have been right at the time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xer... )

As the Wikipedia article states, by 1979, nearly 1500 Altos were out there. This might sound like a long delay, but those 6 years had a lot of work being done to figure stuff out to the point where a commercially viable system design became clear. It took as long for Apple to develop the iPad I believe, a much smaller leap (going by the timing of when the iPad rumors started).

The traditional "fumbling the future" version of the story is more reality TV than reality, and over-dramatizes what happened as bad management, conflict between big egos etc. Despite some of the acrimonious events, the general biz-school case study verdict is that it was in fact good management and disciplined business operations that caused events to unfold as they did; this is the premise of both Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma analysis and Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation analysis. Both those theoretical treatments rely heavily on the Xerox case study. About the only true mistake in a by-the-book sense was the branding (Al Ries got that right in Positioning; the "Xerox" brand name was too solidly anchored to printers/copiers and lacked the elasticity to accommodate computing; the Xerox Star, the commercial version of the Alto might have done better with a different brand, though IMO the system design was by that time inferior to the Apple/IBM designs that eventually succeeded).

While there were elements of "fumbling," don't forget that there WAS a lot of work completed that needed to be properly productized and taken to market. This story would almost certainly have played out the same way even if the people involved had gotten along famously and tried to make it all work out.

Despite what the books like to say, it did NOT all hinge on one path-dependent showdown between Taylor and Xerox management. That would make for a nice climactic moment if they ever make the movie version, but the story is more robust. In a Monte Carlo simulation sense, the structure of innovation and product launches is such that most counterfactual stories would have charted a similar course. Chances are, Xerox would have decided it lacked the go-to-market capability in most scenarios (contrary to popular belief, the technologies didn't leave stealthily; most of the technologies that left PARC left as over-the-radar spin-offs with permission, not as rogue escapees).

It ultimately took 4-5 different companies (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, 3COM, Adobe and Xerox itself, for the laser printer part) with very different DNAs, to get it all out there. All of them contributed critical pieces of the eventual productization model that worked. It was a suite of products, some of which were too early for the market, and some of which were too late for example, and had different supply and distribution chain requirements, production integration structures (vertical vs. horizontal) etc.

This sort of thing happens with complex systems innovations. The airplane was a similar story, with bits and pieces coming from the Wrights, Glenn Curtiss and so forth. Ditto microprocessors. TV and radio both involved messy and litigious battles among many companies.

The traditional telling of the story is unfair to both Xerox and the other institutions/companies that played a big role. For example, PARC is often incorrectly credited for the mouse (no. It was SRI). Other stuff had to happen earlier involving Robert Taylor's previous role at DARPA. Apple, IBM and Microsoft didn't just blindly copy the PARC technology -- what they did added additional critical ingredients, business and delivery models etc.

It takes a village, as they say. It is convenient and easy to tell a simple origin-myth story and the books do exactly that (Fumbling the Future and Dealers of Lightning offer Hollywood style fuel: Bob Taylor as the impressario hero, and the Xerox senior management as the bad guys etc.) The real story was much more involved and had important sub-plots that happened outside Xerox, and before/after the key events at PARC.

For the record, I used to work at the Xerox Webster lab and have collaborated with PARC folks. In the story, the Webster lab has a small side role. Gary Starkweather, who invented laser printing, was at Webster when he came up with the idea. His boss advised him to move to PARC where he'd find a better environment for his work. It is very revealing that for the one PARC piece that Xerox DID have the operational capability to deliver, it delivered in spades. Laser printing has been the mainstay of the company since the early 80s.

Overall, the suite of innovations created a market served today by companies with a combined market cap that was already in the 100 billion range by the 90s, several times Xerox's size. Xerox got the laser printing bit of the action, so it wasn't all a sad story.

There are a lot more internal facts in the picture, well-known to most Xerox employees current and past, but they don't materially affect my opinions and conclusions.

Disclaimer: This is my personal view of the publicly available facts about the
history, and is not related in way to Xerox's official views.