"I projected supreme confidence and everything," Simonyi recalled. "I had a great portfolio and so Ballmer was incredibly impressed." This was an understatement. After a few minutes Ballmer bounced out of his chair, exclaiming, "Bill has to see this!" He dragged Gates out of his meeting and badgered him into thumbing through the portfolio until it was time for Simonyi to catch his flight home. Gates offered him a ride back to the airport.
"We were going in the car and walking up to the gate together," Simonyi said, "and then and there pretty much decided our whole futures. It was amazing. Bill was like twenty-two, looking seventeen. I was thirty-two. The bandwidth we had and the energy just flowing from him was incredible. In a five-minute conversation we could see twenty years into the future."
First, however, he had to resolve the issue of the corporate job in Stamford. Simonyi agreed to make the exploratory trip back East more as a courtesy to Elkind than any other reason. His one visit to Bellevue had already told him that there was infinitely more opportunity outside Xerox than in some "technology staff puke job" in Stamford, Connecticut. "I wasn't unhappy to go. I thought it would be a nice trip. Though I knew there wasn't a chance in hell."
Had he been wavering, his interviews with the staff planning executives would have decided the issue. "Here's Stamford, they had a wing of the building just for these six executives and they're sitting like a Politburo behind two layers of secretaries in their chairs. You could see the bandwidth was minuscule. I was talking to my prospective employer and the guy didn't know what the hell he was talking about and he didn't even know that he didn't know. He knew he wanted some advice on technology and he pretty much knew what he wanted to hear and his questions didn't make sense. It's not that I didn't have the answers, it's that he didn't know enough to ask the right questions."
The contrast with Microsoft was sobering. "We are talking about a sunset industry and a sunrise industry. It was like going into the graveyard or retirement home before going into the maternity ward. I could smell it and feel it. You could see that Microsoft could do things one hundred times faster, literally, I'm not kidding. Six years from that point we overtook Xerox in market valuation."
Simonyi paid two more visits to Bellevue before the end of the year and brought Gates down to PARC once to show him the Alto. Since Gates had expressed an interest in Microsoft's entering the applications business, Simonyi obliged him by charting out a strategy to exploit every market: word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail, even voice recognition— everything PARC had worked on and several things it had not. Helpfully he prepared the document on BravoX and printed it on the SLOT. Form followed function: Gates could read the program and simultaneously absorb its tremendous graphic potential, laid out in a dizzying variety of typefaces and formats. As Simonyi said later, this was his way of becoming "the messenger RNA of the PARC virus."
On Christmas Eve Gates sent Simonyi a job offer by Federal Express. By February he was in place as Microsoft's director of advanced product development. Shortly thereafter Gates asked him, "Have you seen the Chess machine?"
Simonyi waved him off. "Bill, I'm really disappointed. I want to be in serious business. These chess computers are just a vogue. There's no money in them. We should be doing applications, serious stuff."
Gates shook his head. "Charles, you don't understand." He led Simonyi down a hallway toward a small enclosure and opened the door on two engineers working on a machine that in a few short months would alter the office computing market forever and show Xerox the path it had missed.
"Here it is," Gates said. "IBM is making a personal computer. Its code name is Chess."
CHAPTER 25
Blindsided
What the Systems Development Department (it was no longer simply a "division") was finally able to bring any product to market, much less the triumph of integrated system design known as the Star, must have struck some of its own employees as nothing short of miraculous.
The Star programs duration and complexity, the personal tensions within SDD, Xerox's ceaseless vacillation, and numerous other agonies had driven many engineers off the project long before it reached the promised land. Thacker abandoned ship to return to PARC. Simonyi left to sell Altos with Jerry Elkind. Bob Metcalfe quit in 1979 in search of the entrepreneurial main chance.
Even the machine's code name demonstrated SDD's need to clamor for Xerox management's attention. It had been coined by Bob Spinrad in the hope of lending the project some luster in the eyes of Dave Culbertson, a group executive to whom SDD then reported.
"Culbertson was a sailing enthusiast," David Liddle recalled, "so Spinrad decided to name it after a one-design sailing class." After considering "Lightning" and "Sunfish" they settled on "Star," which, as Liddle observed, "was a decent sailboat and a tolerable name for an office appliance."
Engineers both inside and outside SDD expressed frequent doubts about the department’s course. At PARC, many computer engineers viewed the Star as Xerox's attempt to yoke their inventions to its fading office monopoly, to the former's disadvantage. Around mid-1980 Butler Lampson predicted to his SDD friends that they would never ship a product. "They had a system with a million lines of code in it built by a team of people hired off the street," he said. "The whole thing took four years, and in my experience any project that had those properties had another property, which is it wouldn't work. I predicted it wouldn't work and they wouldn't be able to ship it."
He was wrong. On April 27, 1981, at the National Computer Conference trade show in Chicago, SDD formally unveiled the Star as the Xerox 8010 Information System.
With its unique seventeen-inch bitmapped screen and graphical interface, the product was an instant sensation. Its full-dress demos every hour on the hour "had people overflowing into the aisles," recalled Charles Irby, a former Engelbart engineer who had been one of SDD's first recruits from outside PARC.
Irby was particularly amused to notice among the repeat visitors Larry Tesler, then at Apple, and his Lisa design team. "They'd watch every demo, then go off into a corner and talk about what they had seen," he recalled.
The Star's success attested to the pertinacity of David Liddle, who had managed to keep his mind and his organization focused through years of indifferent and even hostile treatment from the Stamford headquarters. Year by year SDD got kicked around the corporate organizational chart—now under the Information Technology Group, now under Xerox Business Systems—until, as Bob Belleville recalled, "We just stopped paying any attention to where we were."
In 1979 the division finally fetched up like a beached whale at the doors of the Office Products Division. This was the Dallas operation originally managed by the detested Bob Potter. But after Potter had moved to International Harvester with his patron, Archie McCardell, the division had come under the charge of an entrepreneurial firebrand.
Don Massaro had joined Xerox when it purchased Shugart Associates, a disk drive company he had co-founded. Brash, risk-oriented, abrasive, and persuasive, he seemed a throwback to the glory days of Shelby Carter. For his divisional symbol he chose the Road Runner from the Warner Brothers cartoons, the better to taunt the Xerox "coyotes" he maintained were constantly out for his tail. "I had not spent twenty years of my life climbing the Xerox ladder rung by rung, playing according to the rules," he told an interviewer. "I was prepared to fail." When Dave Liddle flew down to Dallas to show him the Star software, he was jazzed. "I said, Tuck it! This is incredible technology and we're going to bring it to the marketplace!"
Talk like that was just what the wear)' engineers of SDD needed to shake off their torpor. Massaro was the first Xerox executive they had met who displayed any business acumen at all. He made snap decisions, moved fast, and had more confidence in his own judgment than the rest of the executive roster put together. Rallying behind his drumbeat—"I think we have another 914 on our hands," he crowed to Business Week—they redoubled their efforts to get the Star out the door.
Massaro
also contributed some desperately needed rationality to Xerox's treatment of PARC technology, much of which had been kept under wraps as though by reflex without any consideration given to how best to exploit it. For example, the company had long insisted that Ethernet be kept secret in case it chose someday to market the network as a proprietary product.
"But how would the Xerox Corporation make any money by proprietarily pulling coaxial cable?" as Liddle asked rhetorically. He, Massaro, and Metcalfe proposed an alternative. If other electronics companies could be persuaded to adopt Ethernet as an industry standard, Xerox could profit from what was sure to be an exploding market for the peripherals that were already part of its product line, like laser printers. This would also break IBM's stranglehold on tire networkable equipment market, which it maintained by promoting its inferior "token ring" network—a system that, once installed, compelled users to buy only IBM- made peripherals.
This argument finally prevailed in Stamford, which in 1979 granted Massaro and Liddle approval to make Ethernet public by enlisting Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation in the effort to turn it from an experimental system into one of commercially viable robustness. The new industrial-strength specifications were published in 1980 as the joint Xerox-Intel-DEC Ethernet standard. Xerox's liberal licensing rules, which allowed any company to manufacture Ethernet cards, cables, transceivers, and peripherals after paying of a one-time $1,000 license fee pledging to support the standard as written, turned Ethernet into the most widely used local networking technology in the world.
Don Massaro's enthusiasm for the work of SDD was requited by the ultimate product. The Star workstation he shepherded to launch was an amazing accomplishment. Enclosed in a squat beige-colored box which, like its ancestral Alto, slid on casters under a desk, the machine came packed with features no one had ever seen before and few envisioned in a commercial office machine. These included a bitmapped screen (in "muted blue," as Xerox promotional literature described it at the time), a mouse ("an electronic pointing device"), windowed displays, and "What You See Is What You Get" document preparation. The bundled functions included text processing, a drawing program, the first integrated "help" program, and electronic mail.
By far the system's most striking feature was its graphical user interface, the stylized display that communicated with the user via the bitmapped screen. This arrangement of icons and folders built around what the Star designers called the "desktop metaphor" is so familiar today that it seems to have been a part of computing forever. But its pioneering implementation on the Star included some capabilities that had yet to resurface on the market nearly two decades later. Text, formulas, and graphics could all be edited in the same document. (Compare today's "integrated" software, in which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of "virtual keyboards"—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian.
As the term implied, the user's view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user's personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system's object-oriented software, the Star's user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically "knew" that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star's set of generic commands, in which "move," "copy," and "delete" performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications.
The Star was the epitome of PARC's user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: "When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen," wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, "the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display."
What was even more remarkable was that much of this was accomplished over the objections of Xerox marketing experts, whose kibitzing about even trivial matters slowed the development process by months. Irby recalled a particularly trying confrontation over the mouse with a marketing man from the Dallas division named Ron Johnson.
"The first time he'd ever used a mouse he'd had a bad experience— apparently he'd used a dirty one that didn't track right," Irby said. "So for two years he was against our using it, while we spent all our time on user studies and tests to show him it was the right thing. We spent at least $1 million of Xerox resources proving that it was better than a cursor button or touch screen, which is what he wanted. Finally we presented all these findings to him at a meeting—and he still wouldn't go for it!
"That was one of the very few times when I totally exploded. I got out of my chair and towered over him and yelled about what an idiot he was being. I screamed, 'We're going to use the mouse, goddamn it!' and walked out. We never got a complaint from him again."
Had the Star performed up to the level of its dazzling first impression, Xerox might have been able to to establish and hold that beachhead in office computing craved by dozens of executives ranging from Jim O'Neill to David Liddle.
But the glow faded fast.
The first shortcoming users noticed was its speed. The elaborate system ran, as one of its designers acknowledged, "like molasses." While the Dandelion processor was a marked improvement over Thacker's Dolphin, it was still overwhelmed by the pure tonnage of a million lines of heavy-duty Mesa code running under the surface. "The Star software was built to consume all available computing resources in the universe," cracked Smokey Wallace, an SDD engineer.
Another hurdle was its cost. The Star workstation reached the market at a retail price of $16,595. This might have made sense for equipment aimed at a high-performance engineering market. But it was far more than most commercial businesses would spend to furnish a secretary or clerical worker with capital equipment. Furthermore, nobody could buy just one Star workstation any more than one can eat just one potato chip. A meaningful installation required two to ten workstations, plus a highspeed laser printer and Ethernet to link it all together. That raised the per-user cost to at least $30,000 and the price of the whole integrated system to a quarter of a million dollars or more. Some experts forecast that the Star would not sell until Xerox reeducated its customers to use it properly and made it cheaper. "Its a good product," one said, "for the second half of the 1980s."
Within a few months of its launch the Star began to look like an egregious marketing blunder. It was the old story of engineers building a system that only engineers could love—except that instead of building one too complicated for average users, SDD ha
d built one too big.
It seemed as though SDD as an organization had been driven by designers lacking any counterweight of sales and marketing professionals. As Lampson observed later, "It was kind of amazing that this company whose biggest single strength was marketing set up an organization composed entirely of engineers to get them into a whole new line of business."
In truth, SDD did have marketing advice. The problem was that, possibly for the first time in Xerox history, the marketing experts were so overawed by the system they were examining that they were themselves swept up in the engineers' enthusiasm.
The upshot was a series of surveys known internally as the "Wave" studies, on which the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to analyze its customer base. Undertaken during Spinrad's stewardship of SDD, well before the division priced and launched the Star, the Wave studies compiled data from telephone and face-to-face interviews with decision-makers at nearly 100 companies, as well as on-site surveys at another fifteen businesses that lasted several weeks each, into a shelf full of thick loose-leaf binders.
Dealers of Lightning Page 43