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August 13, 2004
The Charlie Levy Story
Charlie Levy won the President's Award at Xerox 18 or so years ago. He was the software architect who finally figured out how to sell the Xerox workstation. Everybody acknowledged that the machine was a work of genius but nobody could think of an application for it. Besides, it and a printer together cost 12 grand. Charlie called it the Documentor, put together a nice software package and enabled Xerox to sell thousands of them. He got a seven figure bonus and went to retire at a windsurfing commune in Hawaii. True Story.
I met Charlie in his waning days at Xerox at a rooftop party in Manhattan Beach back in '88. He told me two things that I'll never forget, and up until this moment never really questioned. The first thing he said was: "Brains are a cheap commodity." He meant it. The other thing he said was that all the Computer Science PhDs in Silicon Valley are wasting their time. Microsoft owned their future.
In those days, rights to UIs like Motif where heavy and contentious multi-miilion dollar licensing issues. Where Motif is today was inconceivable, even by Richard Stallman. In the eyes of men like Charlie, and those of us who idolized him, software was all owned by clumsy, brutal corporations like Xerox.
In those days, the entire software industry was an appendix to hardware manufacture, just as it was in Xerox. Its economy was directed by people who didn't understand or care about its art. It was as if Shell was a subdivision of Ford. The only exception to the rule was Microsoft, and Microsoft sucked. It made no sense to want to be a software genius because in the end you would only toil for Microsoft.
Nobody questioned that Charlie was prophetic about Silicon Valley until the Netscape IPO. Suddenly the whole planet realized that scruffy, iracsible software guys with beards and Hawaiian shirts could have million dollar paydays - that there could be entire tribes of Charlie Levys. Charlie could not have forseen such an event. Suddenly software itself could be its own business (and not be Oracle, or Microsoft) He was born too soon.
I bring up this story because it is illustrative of how circumstances can make capable people quit after a lifetime of effort, only to see their children's success humble them. You can never master what you are incapable of visualizing, and you never know how a great idea will ultimately be manifest.
Posted by mbowen at August 13, 2004 09:31 AM
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Comments
...and oh so typical of Xerox in those days. Their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was producing, almost like clockwork, amazing feats of engineering (software and hardware) that was way ahead of it's time.
Stodgy Xeroids at the helm didn't see a future in the computer GUI or the modem or the mouse or any of the amazing things that weirdo collection of west-coast geeks were inventing.
They coulda had it all if they could have seen even a little ways beyond the (other) black gold (copier toner). Chalk up another one for paradigm paralysis.
Posted by: memer at August 13, 2004 11:18 AM
..and Money. A whole lot of this is all about whom you believe can be rich.
Posted by: cobb at August 13, 2004 11:30 AM
...The first thing he said was: "Brains are a cheap commodity." ...
Yes, brains ARE cheap, but vision is dear. Twenty years ago I was bitching because our tech pubs dept. was issuing revisions on a 90 day cycle. What the bosses didn't comprehend was this meant every 90 days a revision was printed... but the lead time to produce that revision was 270 days. Drafting was still done by hand and scanned into humongous bitmaps. "Writers" who couldn't write. Terrible inefficiencies.
I proposed at the time we do it all electronically and distribute via modems, but no one had enough hard drive space.
Today it's all outsourced and web based.
Posted by: True_Liberal at August 13, 2004 06:24 PM