POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander. Morrow, $18.95. In the early 1970s,...
...No one had ever run a product development program . . .there was no one who could say that such and such should cost less or should be doable faster...
...This is fascinating to those of us who are more likely to associate the indecency of racism with the Old South and moral regeneration with the New...
...PARC produced many other computer firsts—a pioneering word processing language, a "local area network" through which computers could talk to each other, a laser printer, and a "mouse" for moving characters on the computer screen...
...The alarming theme is that American business is very thin in engineering know-how at the top...
...Emmett Till quickly became a watchword of the civil rights movement, a rallying cry...
...He finds religion everywhere, even in things that aren't apparently religious: "religion was like something in the air, a store of emotion on which people could draw...
...This wasn't Klan-style, organized violence but the act of ordinary white folk...
...And, unlike the 1964 killings in Philadelphia, Mississippi, it wasn't aimed at an agitator or political activist but a teenage boy...
...In August 1955, the 14-year-old Till traveled from Chicago to visit relatives in the Mississippi Delta...
...Soon after, they sold their story to a Look magazine writer in lurid, lucrative detail, all but confessing to the crime...
...a fascination for agrarian ritual...
...Knopf $18.95...
...Fumbling the Future is not an easy book...
...The Alto languished in the PARC labs...
...When the badly mutilated corpse turned up several days later, Till's family identified Bryant and Milam as the men who had kidnapped the boy...
...Yet in the end, precisely the same qualities that Naipaul identified as ruinous to India (a culture too bound up with fantasy, with ritual, with caste, with imaginative history, with defeat) he somehow sees as the salvation of the South...
...Big customers defected when Kodak introduced a better copier...
...McColough also became enamored of something he called "an architecture of information," and in 1970 he commissioned the creation of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to try to figure out what that grandiose phrase meant...
...If you didn't understand automatically, you were 'stupid' It's hard to get a good hearing that way...
...Superior design and engineering—not total dollars spent on research and development—are the major reasons why so many Japanese products work better and cost less...
...The Old South as India, there are remarkable similarities: the consternation with a particular period when outsiders ruled (Reconstruction, the British occupation...
...PARC, in fact, was the theoretical spawning ground for the then-revolutionary notion that the immense power of mainframe computers could be brought to the desktops of individuals...
...that grief was special and was like religion" Religion everywhere...
...There was no trouble at all about the cause then...
...lost souls...
...Jennifer Howard A Turn in the South...
...net income rose from $3 million in 1959 to $348 million in 1974...
...Though the circumstances and the victims were worlds apart, the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, like the death of John F. Kennedy eight years later, shocked a generation out of its innocence...
...When the PARC scientists proudly displayed a personal computer at a 1977 management conference, the wives of the Xerox executives were enthralled by the graphics, the mouse, and the color printers...
...Milam, apparently dragged Till out of bed, beat him, shot him, and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River...
...the issues are not as clear...
...He levels his outrage against Atlanta, the capital of the New South and a place where blacks are believed to have gotten ahead...
...Today...
...So that the politics of Atlanta might have seemed like a game, a drawing off of rage from black people" As right as Naipaul may be about Atlanta, his conclusion that the city's racial progress is worse than nothing has another unstated purpose...
...The second, more encouraging theme is that, in an entrepreneurial economy, for every corporate behemoth like Xerox that gets paralyzed by oncoming headlights, there are hundreds of small, sleek enterprises ready to leap ahead...
...From blacks and whites alike, we hear that the past was better than the present, and several black people speak fondly of segregation, when at least they enjoyed the fellowship and cohesion of being victims, while now they've lost their place in the world...
...Measured scientifically, these were remarkable achievements...
...It's charming to follow this Indian raised in Trinidad, who looks from his jacket photograph like an aged Seminole or Creek, as he checks in and out of rural motels in Mississippi and Alabama, discovers rednecks for the first time and tries to imagine that he's back on the Ganges: "In a pond beside the road on the way to Fort Oglethorpe [Georgia], cattle stood in muddy water up to their bellies—one might have been in India" But this is not an idle ramble...
...This is a curious book altogether...
...Many who were children or teenagers at the time describe Till's death as the point when they became painfully aware of what it meant to be black, and many went on as a result to swell the civil rights movement...
...Yet, despite revisions of the organization charts, soaring pronouncements from top executives, and more money poured into research, Xerox was unable to change...
...His sympathetic portraits of redneck heroes, and of decent white sheriffs and intelligent gentlemen farmers, are a welcome antidote to the unflattering caricatures we often get on television...
...According to McKinsey & Co., the management consultants, American companies are suffering from an "engineering gap" because they bury engineers deep within their organizations and give them little or no authority for the final product...
...This idea leaves this white reader, at least, with the same uneasy feeling I get when I listen to an old recording of "Swanee, How I Love Ya," or "Rock-a-bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody...
...we've read it all before in India: A Wounded Civilization...
...Other prominent blacks, from Eldridge Cleaver to Toni Morrison, speak of the influence the case had on them and their work...
...Muhammed Ali, almost exactly Till's age, recalls the "deep kinship" he felt with the victim...
...PARC scientists quickly developed a reputation for brilliance matched only by a reputation for bad manners...
...a religious and political martyr (Gandhi, King) who preached nonviolence, led people to freedom, and was assassinated...
...It needs a wrap-up chapter with the authors' analyses and conclusions...
...The resemblance to the car industry was more than coincidental— Xerox management was loaded with senior financial executives recruited from Ford Motor Company...
...Some of PARC's brightest scientists now work for these firms...
...Once he's left Atlanta and headed for Charleston, Naipaul drops his cudgel and allows himself to be romanced by the "order and faith, music and melancholy" of the remnants of plantation culture...
...In the early 1970s, computer scientists at a California research center called Xerox PARC built a machine, the Alto, that is considered to have been the world's first personal computer...
...Countless blacks have been the victims of vigilante violence in the South...
...Although Xerox has made a comeback in the copier business, it is still losing prodigious sums of money in electronics...
...David Graulich A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till...
...if you saw 5,000 blacks marching around a courthouse, and you asked them why they were marching, they would say they were marching because they weren't being registered as voters...
...But the men, who had little understanding of office automation and a macho aversion to typewriter keyboards, peered in a standoffish way and asked, 'Oh, can it do that...
...A Baptist pastor from Tennessee explains how the civil rights movement itself has lost definition: "In the old days...
...Free Press, $19.95...
...His decision to condemn the contemporary and to revel in the bygone causes Naipaul to be curiously selective in his treatment of the race problem...
...Ultimately, you realize that it's not just the cow in Fort Oglethorpe but everything else in his journey through the South that reminds Naipaul of India, and that this whole trip is a kind of literal recreation...
...John Rothchild...
...Nevertheless, Fumbling the Future is a superb case study of an organization at war with itself...
...When the company finally introduced a computer based on PARC technology into a market flooded with competitors, the machine was too expensive and too slow...
...but in the end his enthusiasms are suspect...
...Yet for more than 30 years, Till has been relegated to the status of a footnote...
...What he argues, essentially, is that the New South (the fast-growing cities, the research centers, the prosperous university towns) is alienating and somehow evil, while the Old South, the poor and rural South, offers faith, community, and significance...
...defeat like this leads to religion" (speaking of the Civil War...
...Fully half of the company's profits now come from a financial services arm, which sells stocks and insurance, and Xerox is frequently rumored as a target for takeover and breakup...
...This would explain his rejection of the modern South in favor of "the past of which the dead or alienated plantations spoke...
...His point about Atlanta is that blacks may have gained political power but not economic power, and that the one without the other is worse than no power at all: "Perhaps the very dignity that the politics of the city offered a black man made him more aware of the great encircling wealth and true power of white Atlanta...
...a preoccupation with one's place in society that's more important than money...
...Shortly after the encounter, Bryant's husband, Roy, and his halfbrother, J.W...
...Naipaul...
...It lacks the coherence of Naipaul's earlier nonfiction and is more ramble than essay, full of chance encounters and long, breezy interviews with catfish farmers, waitresses, motel clerks, writers, and especially preachers, for whom Naipaul has always had a nose...
...Today, if you saw 5,000 blacks marching, the only thing they can say is, 'We are marching around the courthouse because we are still niggers to you.' " That black people say they prefer segregation to what they've got now is a provocative notion that Naipaul puts to a strange use...
...but Till's murder, coming as it did only months after Brown v. Board of Education put Jim Crow under a death sentence, hit blacks especially hard...
...Stephen J. Whitfield...
...He's no Orville Faubus, quite the opposite, and yet he comes close to adopting the arguments of old-line bigots that blacks and white were better off separate—so even in that way the Old South was preferable to the New...
...Once there, he whistled at, and perhaps propositioned, a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, wife of a local grocery store owner in a town called Money...
...Whitfield's book places Till's murder as a crucial, if hidden, event in the history of civil rights...
...They were arrested, brought to trial on kidnapping and murder charges, and speedily acquitted by an all-white jury...
...Xerox was unable to translate its technological prowess into commercial success...
...an elaborate caste system with which to divide up the races...
...As white politicians played to southern white hysteria, the Till case suggested how difficult and dangerous it would be to dismantle segregation...
...a hearkening back to a golden age...
...And it wasn't Xerox, but brash start-ups like Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, Compaq, and Microsoft that converted the best of PARC's technologies into thriving new enterprises...
...a reverence for the native soil...
...a preference for the unhappy past...
...The Japanese, in contrast, give their engineers wide authority, lots of contact with customers, and overall responsibility for the end product...
...Engineering ignorance beset all senior executives at Xerox," Smith and Alexander write...
...Meanwhile, back in Stamford, Xerox was following the same path as American car manufacturers by concentrating on large, high-profit equip ment while giving little consideration to the Japanese, who were selling smaller, less expensive, high-quality machines...
...Xerox may have fumbled the future, but its fumble also provided the opportunity for fast-moving new competitors to race ahead and make the personal computer as ubiquitous in the workplace as—well, a Xerox machine...
...It enables him to glorify parts of the Old South, where blacks are even less likely to move ahead...
...Whitfield's book indicates that, in killing Till, two white southerners only put another nail in the coffin of the very thing they were trying to keep alive...
...The identities of the characters get blurred...
...The head of Xerox, Peter McColough, personified the enlightened business statesman—dabbling in Democratic politics, serving on prestigious charitable boards, spending millions of Xerox dollars to sponsor educational television...
...Problems kept mounting...
...Key passages of the book discuss technical aspects of computers...
...Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil," recalls one of those activists, Anne Moody...
...And the book ends abruptly, with the resignation of PARC's director in 1983...
...The graphic depictions of the crime published in Look and Life and Jet and the daily press reminded blacks just how vicious the reaction to the new climate of Brown could be...
...In no part of the world," says Naipaul, "had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life...
...This problem goes beyond Xerox...
...But while profits climbed, a bureaucracy that wags called "Burox" settled in...
...Authors Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, management consultants, show that great science will be wasted unless a company is flexible enough to get good products out of the labs and into the hands of customers—quickly...
...Xerox had become wealthy and powerful from its near-monopoly in photocopying...
...An alumnus of the center admits, "PARC suffered from a whole lot of arrogance...
...If you saw black people demonstrating at a lunch counter, they would tell you it was because they weren't allowed to eat at lunch counters...
...Measured by business standards, however, PARC was a disappointment...
...But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black...
...it's more like religion" (speaking of a certain woman's attitude toward her family...
...It's soon apparent that Naipaul is taking a position, although whether this came to him beforehand or during the journey is unclear...
...He moved corporate headquarters from gritty Rochester to preppy Stamford...
...Two conclusions can be drawn from the book— one cautionary, the other heartening...
...An irreversible case of communications gridlock set in between PARC and the rest of the corporation...
Vol. 21 • June 1989 • No. 5
