Dealers of Lightning

by Michael Hiltzik

  Meanwhile Taylor, still viewing Spencer as a potential ally, strived to draw him into his own vision of PARC, which was as a research center devoted entirely to personal computing, free of the dead weight of a physics lab. Shortly after Spencer's promotion to head of PARC, Taylor asked him along to CSL's annual Greybeard offsite at the Bear Hollow resort north of San Francisco.

  "We invited Spencer so we could tell him how the resource allocation should be reorganized," Taylor said—in other words, to repeat the case he had made to the ill-fated Bob Spinrad. "Everybody there complained to him about the investment imbalance." The wary Spencer, however, thought the plan sounded like a blueprint for giving Taylor control of both CSL and SSL, something he was not about to do. He sat through the discussion noncommittallv. Later, after they had all returned home, Taylor talked as though he thought the group had made its case to the new director. Ed McCreight disabused him of the notion at once. "Spencer listened," he cautioned, "but don't get it into your head that he agreed."

  On the contrary, relations between these two strong-willed individu­als were destined to build rapidly toward a crisis.

  Twenty years of experience as a laboratory manager had given Spencer very firm ideas about the obligation of researchers to help their employ­ers turn their work into product—"technology transfer," as it was known in industry. On this task he judged that much of PARC, and particularly CSL, deserved a failing grade. Henceforth, he decreed, fifty percent of the lab bosses' annual evaluations would be based on how well they worked with their "customers"—i.e., the development and manufacturing units of Xerox.

  Taylor's response was, perversely, to step up his demand for new resources. If Spencer wanted this sort of additional contribution out of CSL, he said, he would need more "billets"—in other words, more staff openings. Spencer was astonished. The issue of staffing and bud­gets was exceptionally sensitive at Xerox, given that the company's financially desperate situation had already led to layoffs in its 125,000 strong workforce. "The fact that the research budgets weren't cut was amazing," Spencer said. "In 1981 Xerox hit a wall and by 1982 it was in serious trouble. That year there was no profit-sharing for employees for the first time in company history. The place was being torn apart."

  In contrast to Pake, who dealt with Taylor largely through avoidance, Spencer was not one to suffer defiance mutely or let an affront go unremarked. He liked to give as good as he got: Upon his departure from one job his peers had presented him with a giant mock hypoder­mic, a testament to his penchant for "needling" others. When Taylor pushed, Spencer pushed back harder, dictating more and more explic­itly how he expected Taylor to manage his lab. Taylor, the old expert at defining his role in the hierarchy, had finally met someone insistent on defining his role for him.

  "Taylor is spiraling out of control," Harold Hall observed to his diary on June 28 from the secure perch of a corporate staff job. The CSL staff watched apprehensively as the initial friendliness between Taylor and Spencer deteriorated into outright animosity—the tennis Saturdays were a thing of the past. Butler Lampson, who had become one of the world s first networked "telecommuters" by moving to Philadelphia, where his wife was working as an immunologist, viewed the situation gravely enough to fly to Palo Alto to beg Pake to avert the impending cataclysm. But Pake, toughened perhaps by having Spencer around as spear carrier, proved unexpectedly determined.

  "His position boiled down to that Taylor was too much a pain in the butt," Lampson recalled. "And it's true that Bob was a pain in the butt, absolutely no question about it. But he wasn't actually causing George that much trouble. It's ridiculous to say the functioning of the whole research center was being disrupted. What was really happening was these guys just got on some kind of power trip. They had to have con­trol over Bob."

  This is too limited a view. Pake regarded Taylor's behavior not merely as a personal tribulation, but as a roadblock preventing PARC from ful­filling its corporate destiny. As much as the laser printer represented a commercially valuable technology, Pake thought that only by persuading the company to link it with other PARC digital technologies could the lab help Xerox claim a piece of the future of digital electronic copying.

  "That meant I needed to foster good relations between PARC and the development and engineering units of the copier division," he said later. "Having a group of computer scientists, including their manager, who scoffed at and derided the copier engineers in Rochester did not help PARC develop such good relations." Under Bert Sutherland the System Science Lab had forged a suitably collegial working alliance with the copier division. Pake's alarm at Spinrad's five-year plan had sprouted in part from the thought of how swiftly those friendly ties would be obliter­ated if Taylor were allowed to take over SSL.

  Which is not to deny that Pake also had become deeply distrustful of Taylor's powerful personal influence over his researchers' souls. "I saw Taylor's relationship to his lab members as analogous to Jim Jones and the Jonestown cult," was his remarkable recollection. This impression must have been reinforced, if not inspired, by one senior researcher's explanation for why he had turned down a chance to work with Taylor's lab. "George," the researcher told Pake, "I wouldn't be willing to drink the Kool-Aid."

  "We understood very well Taylor's relationship to his lab members," Pake said later. "What we did not understand was what to do about it."

  Meanwhile, it fell to Spencer to get everyone on Coyote Hill working together in an atmosphere of mutual civility. That August, in a desperate attempt to ease the rancor among his lab chiefs, he convened his own off-site at Pajaro Dunes. There, in the same setting where Alan Kay's group had regularly repaired to contemplate the digital future, the senior lab managers of Xerox PARC flayed each other in an emotional showdown. Until two or three in the morning they vented their feelings like patients in gestalt therapy. "People let their hair down to talk about what really were the problems at PARC," Spencer recalled. The debate seemed honest and heartfelt. As dawn was breaking over the dunes, he allowed himself to think that Taylor—the target of most of their complaints—had finally realized the error of his ways.

  "Bob said, 'I've never heard any of this before,'" Spencer said. " 'Nobody's ever told me what I did wrong. I'm sorry, I didn't know that I was doing these things. I'll change and it will never happen again.' Every­body thought, "Wow! We've solved the problem. Now we can go back and start doing research.'"

  But Taylor did not come away from the retreat with the same perspec­tive. What he had chosen to hear was not a blanket condemnation of his personal behavior, only a rehashing of a few old incidents about which no one had ever directly complained to him before. On those terms he was perfectly willing to apologize for any inadvertent misunderstandings and let bygones be bygones.

  In any case, the era of good feelings did not last long. The very next day Taylor showed up in Spencers office. As Spencer recalls this encounter, Taylor all but disavowed every promise he had made. "Don't believe any- tiring you heard last night," he said, leaving Spencer dumbfounded. "That isn't the way it's going to be."

  Taylor recalls having a distinctly different agenda. He said he was merely anxious to set Spencer straight on some incidents in which he thought he had been cast unfairly as the villain. "I certainly did not tell him, 'Hey, I was just bullshitting when I said such and such.'"

  Either way, it was obvious that the Pajaro Dunes bloodletting had not produced the catharsis Spencer had hoped for. Whatever Taylor thought of the recent confrontation, clearly he was not committed to improving his intramural relationships. Spencer was fed up. He was determined to lay down the law, in writing, and give Taylor a hard deadline to alter his behavior.

  A few days later he summoned Taylor to his office for a formal read­ing out of his alleged violations of good corporate conduct. He ordered Taylor to end any contact he had with competing companies; to reor­ganize his lab into sections and create an intermediate level of man­agement to supervise them; to stop denigrating the other PARC la
bs and their work; and, most humiliating, to report to Spencer's office every Monday at 9 a.m. to discuss his progress toward those goals.

  Failure to fulfill those terms, Spencer said stiffly, could result in Taylor's termination. Then he sent Taylor away with a written memo reflecting what he had said, along with the injunction that the document was confi­dential and he was not to discuss its contents with anyone.

  But for Taylor to leave his own people in the dark was unthinkable. Before the end of the day he called his closest advisors, including Thacker, Mitchell, and Ornstein, to his house in Palo Alto, where he handed Spencer's memo around. He appeared stunned and dejected, as though recognizing that the final act in his Xerox career was playing out.

  "I don't know what's going to happen, but the handwritings on the wall," he told them. He seemed to take particular umbrage at the injunction to cease seeking a deal with another company, an offense of which he insisted he was innocent. "That's like telling me to stop beat­ing my wife," he said.

  Spencer's memo prompted Taylor’s supporters to stage another round of appeals to Pake, this time with explicit warnings that the upshot of forcing Taylor out would be wholesale resignations from CSL. "A whole bunch of people who were in a position to know went to them and veiy carefully explained what was going to happen if they did this," Lampson said. "And they didn't believe us, even though it was perfecdy obvious that we were the source of knowledge on this subject because we were the people who were going to leave. They didn't believe us, or they didn't care."

  Taylor himself figured diere was only one avenue of appeal: directly to David Kearns. Spencer had already apprised Kearns, by now the Xerox CEO, of the impending storm by sending him a copy of the memo with the notation that he expected Keams to back him up on the conditions therein. Otherwise one of them—Spencer or Taylor—would have to go "and he could choose which one." When Taylor asked for a meeting Kearns deputed his chief technical officer, Sandy Campbell, to mediate the quarrel.

  Campbell called Spencer and Taylor to Stamford for a marathon par­ley aimed at resolving the battle "based on the principle," as Spencer put it, "of who had the bigger bladder." Convening in Campbell's office at eight-thirty in the morning, they aired their grievances without respite, fueled only by coffee and Dr Pepper. All the old issues took their turn on the stage: Taylor's arrogance, his demand for a dispropor­tionate share of the budget, his failure to develop managerial talent on his staff. Spencer further suggested that Taylor by his intransigence had actually impeded technology transfer at Xerox.

  "My response was that there was more technology transfer from CSL to SDD than ever in the history of computing," Taylor recalled, "because every tool SDD used they got from us."

  "But SDD failed," Spencer said.

  "That's not my fault," Taylor snapped back. "I was hired to produce the best technology I could. If the product group was not able to take advantage of our technology a lot of people are culpable, not me."

  Finally Spencer accused Taylor of making his memo public in con­travention of a direct order. By then it was two in the afternoon and they had been hard at it for more than five hours.

  "Did you do that?" Campbell asked Taylor.

  "Sure I did," Taylor replied breezily. And why not? "Could anyone be foolish enough to think that this guy was going to tell me to change the way I operated and I'm not going to explain that to the lab?" he remarked later. "That's stupid."

  On that note, Campbell broke up the meeting. Taylor and Spencer shared a corporate car to New York's Kennedy Airport without exchang­ing a single word during the more-than-hour-long trip. On the commer­cial flight home that evening they sat far apart, silently preparing for the final confrontation.

  Taylor had tipped the Greybeards in advance to his agenda when he summoned his lab the following Monday morning, September 19, to the beanbag room. The rest of CSL could only guess why Taylor had called Dealer for such an unusual day and hour. They listened in mounting con­sternation as the only boss many of them had ever known recapitulated the high points of his career, teary-eyed and emotional. Several of his points he had earlier made in a separate memo to Spencer, who was present.

  "Most people spend a lifetime without opportunities for pioneering completely new ways of thinking about large collections of ideas," he said. "I have been fortunate to have been a leader in three: time­sharing; long-distance interactive networking; and personal distributed computing."

  Under Spencer's uneasy gaze, Taylor proceeded to rehash the recent sequence of meetings and confrontations. Then came the fatal words.

  "I want you all to know I've handed in my resignation," he said, and walked out.

  A stunned hush descended on the room. Spencer unwisely took the floor and, as one participant later remembered, "tried to continue the meeting as though what had happened was routine and it was now time to move on to new business."

  Instead the room exploded in fury, all of it aimed directly at him. "I have never watched a grown man be shat upon like that by forty people at once," said Severo Ornstein. "I almost felt sorry for him—except that I was so angry at him."

  The desperate Spencer tried to hold his own against an audience with all the forbearance of a lynch mob. He argued that Taylor’s depar­ture need not represent a major shift in the way the lab was run or a change in their work, that it was a temporary blip soon to be overcome. No one was buying the line. Suddenly a stentorian voice rang out.

  "This is bullshit!"

  All heads swiveled to the source of the outburst. Chuck Thacker had risen to his feet. In the most precise terms an engineers engineer could summon to his lips at that fervid moment, he informed Spencer that he had just committed the gravest mistake of his life. His eyes swept the room. He said he hoped what he was about to do would not be taken as a model or a hint to anyone else; it was a personal state­ment and he wished it to be viewed that way.

  Then he said, "I resign," and followed Taylor out the door.

  Spencer was dumbfounded. Taylor’s resignation he was prepared for; Thacker's came out of nowhere. As the meeting erupted in further recriminations he lost what remained of his grip.

  "What can I do to rectify this?" he asked aloud.

  A voice from the back of the room, over by the whiteboards—he never learned whose it was—called out: "You can fucking resignl"

  His jaw set, Spencer replied, "The company made this choice, not me." Shaken and humiliated, he departed.

  "Spencer fired Taylor," Butler Lampson said later. "Taylor got fired, he didn't resign, no matter what you think happened technically. They created an environment within which he had to resign. They told him, you must do the following twelve things. Basically what it came down to was going into Bill Spencer's office every Monday morning to lick his boots."

  Kearns, to his credit, granted the Greybeards' subsequent request for an emergency audience. Presumably he was aware of how Taylor's ouster had played in the computer science community, because he had been inundated with telegrams and letters from dozens of top aca­demic researchers—as though Taylor's entire ARPA army had risen in protest. Nevertheless, as the commanding officer of a company locked in apocalyptic battle with the Japanese, his sympathy for the self-indulgent eggheads of PARC was necessarily restrained. He preferred to view the flap as the unfortunate result of an executive's ordering a subordinate quite properly to get with the program. If Taylor refused, he had to go.

  For their part, the Greybeards were under no great illusion that Kearns would overrule Spencer. The very episode carried within itself its own irrevocability; as Ornstein reflected, a reinstated Taylor would have been "completely unmanageable." But having flown East on the principle that silence would only be worse, they went through with it.

  Thus they spent a futile morning with Kearns and McColough, who was still chairman of the board. Omstein found himself repeating in Kearns's ear, like a mantra, "This lab will be gone inside of six months." The third time, Keams turned to him with a steely
glare and said curtly: "I heard you."

  "I came away thinking, he'll back his guys," Ornstein recalled.

  The exodus did occur as they predicted, although not instantaneously. While Thacker left immediately to work with a startup com­pany marketing a paging device he had invented, many other CSL staff members deferred their resignations until after the end of the year, when their bonuses, retirement credit, stock options, and other perks would vest for 1983.

  But then the floodgates opened. "During that first couple of weeks in January there were like two or three resignations a day, because people had already done their looking around," Warren Teitelman remem­bered. "We would stand out in the halls afraid to read our e-mail, because it would only say, well, we lost two principal scientists and three senior scientists today."

  There can be little doubt that Bob Taylor's bosses underestimated— and more critically, misunderstood—his relationship with his labora­tory members. On an administrative level he had ceded the job of cor­porate politicking to Jerry Elkind; on a technical level he was vastly overshadowed by Butler Lampson (as was almost everyone else). But his role was always more subtle, and bound to seem different depend­ing on whether it was viewed from within the lab or without. Taylor had created the very habitat that his engineers and scientists depended on to pursue their work. He was not only the buffer between them and the mundane concerns of corporate Xerox, but the indispensable light­ning rod for all the complaints about their arrogance and elitism.