Dealers of Lightning, by Michael A. Hiltzik

Several years ago I read Fumbling the Future about the failure of Xerox to capitalize on the creation of GUI-driven networked personal computers years before their competition. Dealers of Lightning is another look at the same PARC Labs organization, but concentrates more on the inventors than the inventions themselves. While equally compelling, Dealers of Lightning draws a different conclusion from Fumbling the Future: Xerox didn’t squander a golden opportunity, but instead the idea that a single company can remain in control of such a fast moving and constantly changing industry as computing is capricious and Xerox shouldn’t be blamed. While I agree the hardware/software trade is extremely fluid, the fact that Xerox—other than laser printers—has never been an important market player in this world still points to a serious lack of capitalizing on their intellectual property.

I hold a fairly low opinion of the predictive ability of most marketers and analysts (Gartner Group and Forrester Research especially). To me, these groups make broad forecasts and then reward companies with good reviews and placement in the appropriate magic quadrant that either pay them or develop product that make their predictions appear to be accurate. My cynicism aside, Dealers of Lightning provides a good overview of the perils of blindly following the path blazed by such divination. In 1981 Xerox conducted a series of market surveys that concluded “the Star was so good and latent demand so strong that customers would clamor for the technology regardless of price.” Of course, the Star sold for over $16,000 each and was a closed-system, competing with the open ~$5,000 IBM PC. Is it fair to hold analysts accountable for failing to predict that IBM would create a cheap machine that revolutionized the market? Maybe not, although Moore’s Law that foresaw exactly this was not only widely accepted in the industry but one of the founding principles of Xerox’s own PARC Labs.

While not a major aspect of the story, one line literally made me laugh out loud: “COBOL was the tedious programming language used for repetitive and uncomplicated business programs such as payrolls and budgets.” I currently work for Micro Focus, one of the leading maker of COBOL products in the world. There aren’t very many people in my company that would appreciate the language described as tedious and uncomplicated!

First Sentence:

The photograph shows a handsome man in a checked sport shirt, his boyish face half-obscured by a cloud of pipe smoke.

Fumbling the Future, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander

In 1973, Xerox had built a networked personal computer, mouse, graphical user interface, and laser printer. Before Microsoft. Before IBM. Before Apple. Yet nobody has ever heard of the Alto, and Xerox is still known as a copier company. How did all this technology get squandered?

I really enjoyed this story. It is a fantastic look at what happens when marketers and developers aren’t on the same page. Xerox marketing didn’t think a PC would be useful (some bright bulbs in that group!) and the developers kept improving technologies Xerox didn’t want to sell. This is a cautionary tale about what can happen with poor management and poor communication within a company. I recommend it to anyone in a high-tech company, especially those directly influencing product creation.

First Sentence:

Here is a three-part trivia question about televised personal computer advertising: Name the companies responsible for

1. The longest playing series of personal computer commercials?
2. The most creative single commercial?
3. The first personal computer commercial?

Understanding Variation, by Donald Wheeler

This book has some great insights into data analysis and process behavior charts. Some would call this a very boring, extremely dry topic; unfortunately, the style in which it was written won’t change many minds. Some really good stuff in here about how to separate signal from noise when examining data. An idea I’ve held for a while is that arbitrary numerical goals can be counterproductive, and this book explains why. Is this a page turner? No. Does it make reasonably complicated statistics much easier to understand? Yes.

First Sentence:

Recently the U.S. Trade Balance for February showed a deficit of 11.4 billion dollars.

The Goal, by Goldratt and Cox

Unlike most management books, instead of being a collection of anecdotes told to support a central premise, this one is a novel—a true tale of fiction. (While bookstores probably shelve this with the other business texts, my local library puts it in the fiction section which probably reduces the chances of browsing across it.) The Goal tells the story of a plant manager that takes an underperforming factory and turns it into the market leader. The business value comes from examining how and why this was able to happen. There is also a side-story about how the manager saves his marriage that I suppose is supposed to parallel the success of the plant, but I found this distracting and unneeded.

I suspect that various people will take away different things from this book, which is a good indication of why it is so popular. For me, this reinforced my belief that understanding priorities is one of the most useful (and under-used) tools that we can use to make decisions. The goal of the plant is to make money, but instead of being measured by how much money it generates, it is measured by the cost to operate the various internal machinery. Once the hero and his team realize this, they change their priorities to emphasize total throughput instead of making the individual steps more efficient. A sort of “the good of the many outweighs the good of the few” moment. The chapters where we are taken through an example of why point optimizations don’t equal overall improvements were particularly interesting, if a bit contrived. The context is watching a single-file line of hikers and examining why the gaps between them expand and contract at different rates. The boys are named in alphabetical order (Andy, Ben, Chuck, Dave, and Evan) which for some reason I found jarring in a supposed novel.

While Tom Clancy doesn’t have much to worry about, I found a novel to be a refreshing approach for discussing what is pretty dry topic. I’d recommend this to anyone that is trying to understand how decisions should get made or how to improve a process. If you are just looking for an entertaining story, though, I’d keep looking.

First Sentence:

I come through the gate this morning at 7:30 and I can see it from across the lot: the crimson Mercedes.