Xerox PARC invented the graphical interface, the mouse, and networked computing, and gave the ideas away almost by accident to visitors from Apple and Microsoft who knew what to do with them. Blockbuster was offered the chance to buy Netflix for fifty million dollars and turned it down. None of this was written into the nature of the ideas themselves. It was written into who happened to be in the room.
|
|||||
Samizdata quote of the day – chance and its consequencesJuly 26th, 2026 |
 11 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – chance and its consequencesLeave a Reply |
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Certainly luck plays a role in individual success, but there is an overall thrust in society, manifest through free markets, that has little to do with luck. Things are generally invented when they can be invented, which is to say, when the precursors are invented, in one long chain of causality back to some guy rubbing two sticks together to make fire. There is no guarantee that Steve Jobs would be the man to introduce the graphical user interface to computers, but it was guaranteed someone would (in fact there were many fairly rudimentary versions around at the time.) And, FWIW, it is not at all true that Xerox gave away the ideas, and certainly not by accident, there was a lot of money changed hands. Certainly Microsoft went on to “steal” those ideas but are we really to believe that the world is worse off because of this theft? The crucible of capitalism advanced those ideas freely at a speed vastly larger than had they been locked up in patent prison belonging only to Apple.
This inevitability of the invention of ideas, along with the reality that ideas are worth almost nothing when unmanifest, it is the engineering process that manifests the advance of civilization, that makes me such an implacable opponent of patents, where ideas not engineering is rewarded in a very unjust way.
Now who develops it is important, “great men” in industry matter, I think, a lot more than great men in politics. To give an example Tim Berners-Lee designed the early protocols of the Web and the first web browser and gave it away for free or more specifically his employer did. No doubt had he not done some either Apple or Microsoft would have done so and it would have been a proprietary locked in system and be much less useful for it (though it is worth saying that the much maligned Internet Explorer 6, is the one that widely introduced the idea of asynchronous http, which is at the root of all modern web applications, primarily, I believe, to support their web based version of Outlook.)
We see this playing out also in the AI space. The earliest of the modern iteration of AI was nurtured at Google through the acquisition of Deep Mind and the brilliant Demis Hassabis. However, it was Musk’s concern that the Google leadership had little concern for the potential threats of AI that lead him to found OpenAI — a company that was designed from the beginning to be open source, a charity and a property of the whole world — to save it from being locked into a huge corporation. However, it was taken over by the loathsome Sam Altman and transformed into the dangerous organization it is today, and in particular the early release of ChatGPT forced it out of all the labs before it really had time to gestate properly. And from that spun off Anthropic as some of the best engineers left in disgust at Altman, and eventually xAI and Grok designed from the beginning to be truth seeking. The other players were minor Facebook and Amazon mainly, both largely missing the boat. So, the presence of the various great men, Hassabis, Musk and later Amodei (heavily influenced by his much less well known sister), and the risk posed by the very dangerous Altman, are all playing together to shape the future of the whole of humanity.
So, yes, there is luck involved, though as the saying goes, the harder I try the luckier I get, but who wins that lottery matters a very great deal.
It is why, as I have said many times, despite the fact that he is often a bit of an asshole, Musk is the most important human alive today. Much of the future of humanity rests in his hands and we are very fortunate that it is in the hands of a good guy, who seeks things like truth, free speech, the advancement of humanity and the growth of knowledge and curiosity often to his own personal detriment.
And I have to ask the question — how can the patent system possibly survived in a world driven by AIs that can produce ideas and the engineering of those ideas at almost infinite speed for almost infinitesimal money? Patents are the worst manifestation of crony capitalism, and the sooner they fall into irrelevance the better off we will all be.
A little on the curate’s egg side, I would say. It is of course true that chance and merit (of all types – talent, experience, persistence, planning, shrewd risk assessment, decisiveness etc) combine to deliver success, failure or something in between, in all fields, not just commerce. So Pirie’s piece serves as a prophylactic against hubris.
But I have four problems with it :
1. do not be too hasty to ascribe aspects of merit to chance. In his Xerox example, it reads like Apple and Microsoft’s exploitation of Xerox’s ideas was just about being in the room. Which obviously it wasn’t. Had I been in the room, nothing would have come of it. So no doubt there’s some luck involved, but also quite a lot of those meritorious traits that I listed. Which brings me to….
2. Since it is pretty much impossible to analyse the respective value of the contributions of chance and merit – from a microeconomic point of view it is logical to reward success simpliciter. Merit is worth maximising, and if it is maximised, the reward from merit + luck will also be maximised. So there is no good microeconomic argument, reliant on luck, for abandoning “to the winner, the spoils” as a wealth maximising heuristic.
3. While from a spiritual point of view it is no doubt good to remind the successful that they did not in fact earn ALL of their success, it is by no means clear that from an economic point of view this is good policy. Belief that you ARE responsible for your success and failure is an excellent motivator to maximise your merit. And the contrary belief is lassitude inducing.
4. It is not only the successful who benefit from the luck involved in their own success. Consumers still reap their surplus.
I am a big believer in luck, or chance. But careless talk about it costs plenty. Even lives, if the talk encourages communist sympathies.
The post is not about “luck” – it is about individual human beings having opportunities, some people use the opportunities and some people do not. It is a matter of understanding the opportunity and having the will to really do something about it.
Paul, Perry correctly copied the title of Pirie’s piece onto the Samizdata title. Chance and luck referenced several times.
Indeed so, Fraser. Xerox SmallTalk is pretty clunky, barely closer to a modern GUI than a command prompt. But if the Star, whose OS is not what Jobs et al. saw at PARC, and actually featured the first “desktop metaphor”, hadn’t been a commercial failure (because the machines it ran on cost $15,000), Xerox may well have been remembered as the company which “introduced the GUI to the world” after all.
And, of course, Apple very nearly fell into the same hole. The Lisa cost $10,000 at launch: less than the Star, certainly, but hardly competitive when you could have a base-model IBM PC for $1,500. (Or an Apple IIe for $100 less, if it comes to that.) At $2,400 a year later, the Mac was certainly more affordable, but still about twice as much as the competition and, contrary to popular belief, not a sales success. It’s often forgotten that this was why Jobs was forced out of his own company: the Mac was his baby, and it was killing them. The firm was kept afloat, much to his annoyance, by the ageing Apple II line even as late as the early ’90s. He went off and founded NeXT, launching another $10,000 computer in 1989.
Fact is, like it or not, the business world was really introduced to the GUI by Windows 3 in 1990 (and the home market, albeit mainly confined to Europe, by AmigaOS in 1987/88). Before then it was very much a high-end niche product. Jobs deserves credit for seeing where the future lay, but you’re right: it would have happened without him.
There will now be a moment of silence for Digital Research’s GEM, VisiCorp’s VisiON, Quarterdeck Desqview, GEOS, IBM TopView…
I was using the RISC OS GUI in 1987, and it remained well in advance of anything PC-side, that ten years later when I had to use PCs for work I was gobsmacked at their incapability.
Sam has the history bang-on.
Xerox never really had the idea that “ordinary folks” would want a computer. Ditto for IBM. The IBM 5150 was made by IBM very reluctantly.
I think a lot of this comes down to not just knowing the “how?” but also grasping the “why?”
Faraday had just displayed a very early electric motor.
Pretty embarrassing that they not only repeat the qwerty myth, they repeat the most obviously stupid version. Even the Gould version looks unstupid by comparison.
Paul:
Robert Heinlein summed it up thusly:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Lee Moore – yes, and they clearly should NOT have been.
It was not a matter of luck – it was a matter of understanding and choice.
@Sam Duncan
I dont know where you were getting a IBM PC (a 5150) for $1500 in 1984 but the best deal in the Feb 1984 BYTE was $2600 (+ sales tax). That was bare bones. No HD. Got my copy of BYTE beside me. The one with the Mac guys Bill and Burrel on the cover. Got to meet most of them the following year. And the rest (sans Jobs) two years later. In one of the buildings on Mariani. Interesting times.
I know a bit about Xerox PARC / GUI’s / who invented what, when, and why they mostly failed as I had a Lisa on my desk for almost 2 years, was at the Mac launch in 1984, shipped my first Mac product mid 1985 and shipped my last one (so far) in 2011. I was there.
Your garbled story of what happened and why ranges from the huh? to the straight up totally wrong. Ever use a Xerox Star? Coworkers roommate had one in 1985. Know your way around Smalltalk 80? I picked up Adele Goldberg’s book when it came out in early 1983. Still have the Apple Smalltalk 80 floppies somewhere. Apart from the 3 button mouse, no menubar, and a different document metaphor it would mostly have been fairly straight-forward for the typical Mac use of the mid 1980’s to navigate the Xerox Star / Smalltalk 80 GUI after some poking around. Unlike Win 2.0 and Win 3.0. Which were total messes. Utterly incoherent and very confusing.
FYI Win 3.1 (in 1992) was the very first version of Windows that actually kinda worked (but it usually crashed if you even looked at it). And Win95 was the first version that was in any way useable. For commercial shrink-wrap applications. Although WinNT 3.5 was the only one that was actually stable at the time. We tried to do as much Win95 dev work on NT boxes. Because Win95 boxes fell over so much. We did not even bother doing anything for Win 3.0 / Win3.1. No market and Redmond were not willing to put up enough money to make ports worth our while.
The real reason Xerox did not fully commercialize what they had in PARC is very simple. The financial numbers did not make sense to them. Xerox (or rather Rank Xerox) back in Rochester had decided after their many disastrous diversification fiascos including scientific computers that they did not want to get deeper into a (very expensive) business they did not understand. Personal and business PC’s / workstations. And given the huge pressure Rank were putting on Rochester to stop wasting money like a drunker sailor on shore leave Xerox made the only decision they could. License PARC technology it to others. Which they did. Although often with ill-grace. But that’s i.p lawyers for you.
So not quiet the neat and tidy story which so many seem to believe.
I was only in PARC once. When I overshot heading north on Hillview and had to turn in their parking lot. So a bit like the time I was in the Tesla HQ when it was just up the street..
The Valley is like that.