Dealers of Lightning (72 page)

Heeding the mysterious tarot, Tesler accepted the job that April. He
would go on to head the Lisa user interface team and to help design
the Macintosh, eventually rising to the position of Apple's chief scien­tist. The sign he was waiting for had come. PARC's elitism had begun
to seem threadbare, and even a little reactionary.

"I remember once I said to Bob Taylor, 'You know, I've been going to
these Homebrew computer meetings and I've been talking to people
at Apple and hanging out
in
the personal computer scene. There's a lot
of smart people out there who are going to run way ahead of PARC in
PCs. Xerox will never catch up, even with better stuff.'

"And Taylor smoked his pipe and said, 'No, that's not going to hap­pen, because we have the smartest people here. I believe if you have
the smartest people you'll end up ahead.'
"I said, 'Bob, I've met people outside. They're very smart in this place,
no question about it, but there are smart people who don't work for
PARC. They do exist, and there are enough of them out there that they
can do just fine.'

"He said, 'If you find someone as smart as the people here, just tell
me who they are and we'll hire them!
'

"I just told him, 'It's not going to work like that.'"

Even before Steve Jobs's arrival on the scene PARC had
been facing the prospect of wrenching change. The first
sign that trouble lay ahead came in May 1978, just after
that years annual corporate meeting in San Francisco. That Friday, when
the Xerox contingent had already returned back East, George Pake got a
phone call from Jack Goldman.

In terms of both men s careers, it was almost as momentous a call as the
one eight years earlier when Goldman had offered Pake the chance to
manage a unique new research center. But this was a different Jack Gold­man. Pake's old mentor, far from being at the top of his game with all the
resources of a powerful industrial machine at his command, sounded
frightened and querulous.

"George," he said, "you gotta be here in Connecticut on Monday. I
gotta talk to you. They're taking the research labs away from me."

As long as Jack Goldman had toiled under the protective shade of Peter
McColough he tended to win a fair share of his battles with Xerox culture
and bureaucracy, especially the early crucial skirmishes over the consoli­dation of all Xerox research in his own hands and the establishment of
PARC. But as the lost decade of the 1970s wore on and Xerox sank
deeper into its slough, Goldman's distance from the chairman's ear
lengthened and his influence waned. Just as McColough had recruited
Goldman from Ford to reanimate Xerox research, he had imported a
group of outside finance experts to modernize the company's ailing rev­enue and expense structures. More and more, they were in charge.

They proved to be a stultifying and self-perpetuating cadre. Company
President Archie McCardell, whose passion for figures rivaled that of the
ancient numerologists, came from Ford, whence he recruited Jim
O'Neill, who had once been his superior, to head the Information Tech­nology Group. Soon they were joined by three other Ford men, clustered
in the highest stratum of Xerox management. By the start of 1978 Gold­man was still a member of Xerox's board of directors, but no longer
reported directly to Peter McColough. Instead he was sequestered three
rungs down in the organizational ladder and outnumbered by the new­comers.

He did not take well to the
de facto
demotion, nor to the alien man­agement culture that McCardell and O'Neill had brought with them.
As he witnessed the new men's ineffectual struggle to stem Xerox's
decline from a vantage point hopelessly remote from the seat of power,
he became more irascible. Jack Goldman's aura was beginning to fade,
one loyalist recalled, "accelerated by his indubitably abrasive manner
in the presence of incompetence, which was abundant at the higher
levels of Xerox."

This was a somewhat unfair assessment of the new executives. Many
were simply in the wrong place in the wrong company. Xerox needed
to embrace radical new technologies to resuscitate its product lines.
But they were trying to squeeze the last drops of blood from the same
tired copiers by applying snazzy new management theories and pinch­ing pennies. Had the crisis been rooted solely in Xerox's complacency
or a bad economy, their reorganizations and cost-cutting strategies
might have borne fruit. But the affliction ran much deeper.

Perhaps the best illustration of the conflict between the new technolo­gists and the financial engineers was the short, bitter career of Myron
Tribus, who was hired on Goldman's recommendation as senior vice
president for research and engineering in 1972 and got driven out by
O'Neill before the close of 1974. Crusty and temperamental, Tribus was
a former Commerce Department official and dean of engineering at
Dartmouth. He was also, as Goldman attested, "one of the most brilliant
engineers in this country. A difficult guy to deal with, as is often the case
when you're dealing with geniuses, but an absolutely brilliant engineer."

Tribus realized within a few weeks of his arrival in Rochester that
Xerox executives did not define their business as making copiers, but
rather as making money. The products generating the revenues were
almost irrelevant; for them the issues of management would have been
no different had they been turning out cars, or raw steel, or shoes.
"They saw Xerox as a money pump and they organized it around that
concept," Tribus said. "The people at the top of Xerox were not really
interested in technology."

As a result, Xerox technology and engineering had turned distinctly
slovenly. Customer complaints battered against the company walls like a
storm surge, but no system existed to convert reports from the field into
product improvements. Tribus imposed a rigorous order on this haphaz­ard environment. He demanded that every part going into a Xerox
copier, down to the smallest spring, be documented like a component in
a jet engine so that repairmen and engineers needed only to flip open a
book to locate the trouble spots. "I realized," he said, "we had to get reli­ability."

Almost alone among the top executives, Tribus was enchanted with
PARC. He visited Palo Alto regularly and, back home, pressured O'Neill
to market the laser printer as an alternative to the slow and noisy IBM
machines whose hideous output then passed for high-tech computer
printing. After Tribus's secretary was awarded an Alto out of the corpo­rate consignment he studied the change in her work habits with frank fas­cination. "When they took it away to check on its wear and tear she cried,
really cried," he said. "I thought to myself, 'This is something really big.'"

Unfortunately, one skill Tribus had not learned during his long career
in government and academia was how to survive in a corporate executive
suite. He was constitutionally unable to coddle underlings or suffer fools
gladly; nor was he alert to the necessity of protecting his flank. Even sub­ordinates who admired his brains hated
his brusque
and doctrinaire
man­ner. As
for his peers in management,
who resented
the blunt delight with
which he rubbed their noses in his
superior
technical judgment, they
smelled his lack of corporate savvy like
lions
circling a lame wildebeest.

Eventually
he ended up sandwiched
in the
pecking order between
O'Neill
and an engineering
manager named Robert J.
Sparacino. Sparacino had honed his corporate
infighting skills at
that war college of inter­nal competition, General
Motors, where an
executive at
Pontiac
would
win
as
much praise for outsmarting
his compeers
at Buick as for beating
Chrysler. O'Neill
at first assigned
him to be Tribus's
subordinate, but over
a
period of montiis arranged
to give the junior
man more responsibilities
at
Tribus's
expense.

"They
connived to get rid of
me," Tribus
recalled.
"I
had never been in
a
corporation.
I
found myself in
an alien land,
and working at the top
I
saw a
lot of things going on
that I thought were
just plain stupid.
But
the
other guys had
MBAs
and
I
did
not, and they
talked a common language
and
I
was clearly an outsider.
I fought that system
tooth and nail until
some of my good friends came to
me and said,
'Myron, you look like hell,
working from seven in the morning
till seven
at night surrounded by guys
who
just
want
to do you in.
You've got to get out
of there or you'll be dead
in
a year.'"

Tribus's
resignation in 1974 to
accept a teaching
post at
MIT
deprived
Goldman of a soulmate and an ally.
He was
left to fight the
Ford
finance
clique
as a minority of one.
What he lacked in
manpower he made up for
in vituperation. The carping within
the executive
suite grew intolerable.
While Goldman
sniped at the very idea of having "the engineering divi­sion headed up by an accountant who just didn't understand things like
Moore's Law
or the role of software,"
O'Neill
and Sparacino nagged him
about the half-baked and unmarketable prototypes coming out of
PARC.
Sparacino
at
one point was heard to remark that "office systems will
never amount to diddly-squat at
Xerox,"
a prophecy many thought he
worked to make self-fulfilling.

But
Goldman did not always have realism on his side.
Even
his clos­est allies recognized that he had little conception of the economics of
product development
—
the indispensable second half of
"R&D."

"Jack did not understand what you had to do with bright ideas from
bright people to make them into real products that could go into a real
market," acknowledged George White, a member of his research man­agement staff. And with O'Neill and Sparacino continuing to control
all marketing and engineering, Goldman had less clout than ever to
force research-driven products into the marketplace even as market
probes. It was his old problem at Ford ("Not much of your stuff gets
on a car, does it, Jack?"), exacerbated by vicious personal animosities.
He could only watch powerlessly as his most cherished ventures—the
laser printer sale to Lawrence Livermore, the marketing of the Alto
III—became the victims of political spats.