As senior vice president of Xerox Corporation, Mark B. Myers is
responsible for the company's worldwide research and technology,
architecture and standards, advanced technology and competency
development, and new markets exploration and development.
Educom Review: Let's talk about the nature of modern R&D. Are the R&D
organizations of very large companies all pretty much the same, or are
they different?
Myers: They tend to be quite different. First of all, they're different
just by virtue of the different businesses they're part of:
pharmaceutical, telecom, consumer electronics, and so forth. Each
business has a different character, requiring a different research focus
and style to respond to different industry market dynamics. R&D has to
be fairly flavor specific to the particular industry.
The Xerox Corporation is interesting because it has had an unusual
growth and development in such a short period of time. When I joined the
company 30 years ago, total revenues were in the two-to-three-hundred-
million-dollar range, and now they're in the 18-billion-dollar-range.
That's like going from a frontier town to a major modern metropolis in
the span of one generation. And so we had the job of creating the notion
of a central research capability that went far beyond supporting the
development of the initial, hugely successful xerography products, to
moving to define future innovations that will support the business
beyond those initial successes.
ER: Of course, the relation between technological innovation and
successful product is notoriously tenuous, and we can all think of great
companies, including Xerox, that have had bad experiences trying to turn
innovations into market successes.
Myers: That's right, and I think the challenge is for both the research
community and the business community to work together at the
intersection of emerging technology in emergent markets, where you will
always find a lot of dynamics and a lot of uncertainty contrasted with
the relatively knowable R&D needs for established markets. Many
companies, Xerox included, have been highly successful at identifying
and developing technology for existing businesses, in which it is
possible to improve products, services, and operations simply through
technology improvements and upgrades. That's fairly easy to do, because
you fully understand the market.
What's much harder to deal with is emergent markets: markets that
do not exist today, markets that could exist if the technological
possibilities and real needs can find a fit. With emergent markets you
can't just do good market research and say, "Yes, this is it; this is
what we have to do"; no, you have to explore your way as you go along.
ER: What example comes to mind?
Myers: Personal digital assistants--PDAs. Things like the Newton, the
Simon, and so forth. There may be some implementation issues to be
solved, but having highly portable, easily accessed devices with very
user-friendly interfaces is a big idea. But the issue is, Can the
technology be implemented in such a way that it not only fulfills that
idea but also finds a market and offers useful applications for that
market? There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of learning in
the initial entries in terms of these PDAs. Whether or not an initial
technical interpretation of an idea is successful, you need to be able
to take what you've learned and profit from it. If you have the
capability in your organization and your labs, you need to revise and
improve your innovation and then rapidly come back to the marketplace.
If you can do that, you can create a learning cycle of adapting
technology based on what the marketplace is telling you.
Or you can look at it and just say, "Gee, this is a failure, and
I'm not going to go forward," and then just slink away from it. And the
latter is very often why companies fail. They expect everything they do
in the marketplace to be successful! Well, that's just not going to be
the case, and so the key is, Can you go to the marketplace in such a way
that you can learn from the market, as well as teach the market so that
there's adaptation on both sides and so that you can use this mutual
learning process to come back with the right product or service?
ER: Is there an example in Xerox itself?
Myers: Sure. If you'll remember, Xerox was the first company to put out
a workstation that had all the things we have now: client/server
architecture, WYSIWYG interface, network capabilities, print server,
file service, windows, icons, multitasking--everything we now think of
as the modern desktop client/server paradigm. It came out of the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center [PARC] in the early eighties. The Star.
Wonderful technology, but a market failure.
ER: What did Xerox learn from its failure?
Myers: Xerox frankly did not learn, and to me that was the real failure.
The company did not use the market rejection as a learning process. The
initial problem was that the company went to the market with a product
that was technology driven rather than market sensitive. It didn't have
applications such as spreadsheets and things of that nature that really
drove the PC, and it came in technologically too heavy for the
marketplace.
ER: In what sense?
Myers: It required too much learning, for one thing, and it required
executives to spend most of their time at workstations. Even today,
there's still a high proportion of executives who are not willing to do
that. So the technology was full of wonderful ideas, but its initial fit
into the marketplace was not quite right, and the introduction of the
product was not done in a way that would allow rapid learning and
adaptation of product based on that learning. And so it was a failure.
But it was an extraordinary technology.
ER: What emergent market are you coping with now?
Myers: Basically, we're working today with a big idea about how
documents influence and provide the glue to collective work processing.
If you take a look at organizations or enterprises or universities, the
role of documents and the technology to support documents is crucial.
Communicating processes are really a key substrate through which
information is exchanged and commitments made. One analogy made by one
of our PARC scientists is that a document is the ratchet of human
understanding--of group understanding. Because if you have a
conversation but don't have any way to collectively recall that
conversation or if you create something but then don't have any way of
recording it, then your conversation disappears or your creation
disappears. The document is at the core of human communications.
ER: What about electronic communications? We tend to think of documents
as things existing on paper, but of course they don't have to.
Myers: That's right. It's best to think of paper documents as just one
form of document. John Seely Brown of PARC likes to talk about document
space, in which knowledge can be documented in a number of different
ways: by traditional paper documents, by video documents, by audio
documents, or by combinations of all of the above. We have strong
traditions and lots of experience with respect to just one of these, but
the others will become very powerful, and we're already starting to see
that in the use of video documents.
ER: Is it safe to say that networking will play an important role in
Xerox's technology strategy?
Myers: A huge role. The cost-effective computation reinforced by cost-
effective communications will create a very powerful change in
technology and in the ways people work with and relate to one another.
Networking issues play an enormous role in our research activities.
ER: Is all Xerox development done in-house, or is some of it
accomplished through partnerships?
Myers: There's an increasing amount of partnering, which is necessary
because of the way the computer industry has evolved. It's moved from a
vertical industry--in which the computer platform, the operating system,
the network software, etc., etc., were all part of an integrated
process, and that was characteristic of IBM and DEC and others,
including Xerox with its reprographics products--to a horizontal
industry wherein you have different people providing the computational
platform--Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments, whoever--and different
companies providing operating systems--Microsoft, Apple, the companies
offering Unix--and then the same thing with networking and applications
and everything else. There have got to be partnerships now, because the
product itself is the integration of all these things.
ER: And will partnerships lead to mergers? Will we be reading soon about
Xerox participating in a merger?
Myers: There's no plan for Xerox to merge with anyone. You see a lot of
consolidations going on in the software industry today. Five or six
years ago Aldus and Adobe were not planning to merge, but now they have.
So there's always consolidation and shakeout going on--in any industry.
There's certainly plenty of consolidation going on now in the defense
world in response to a government shift from defense to commercial
priorities. Consolidation is continuous and inevitable. There were a lot
of automobile companies at one time. Most of those companies in GM were
once separate companies.
ER: But apart from consolidation with competing companies, what about
mergers with complementary companies?
Myers: Probably what you're going to find is that people will not want
to join a full, integrated, permanent merger but will want to form
specific, focused partnerships with a definite time clock. You know,
there's a dynamic lifetime to this relationship, and it might be
sensible for two businesses to come together for just a five-year
period. There's a dynamic in the marketplace that encourages strategic
relationships that bind companies together pretty deeply at least for
some part of their business, but does not require a full integration of
their operations.
For example, there's a highly successful laser desktop partnership
between Canon and Hewlett-Packard, yet there's no merger of corporate
cultures and they even compete with each other in other product lines.
And that's another dimension of partnering that is tricky: increasingly
you'll have situations when your partner will also be your competitor.
That's a hard notion to get your head around. It requires creative
thinking, not business as usual.
ER: How would you grade the higher education system's efforts at
producing creative thinkers?
Myers: In general, pretty good, but the institutions are in turmoil
today because of the changing expectations of society, the diminished
funding of research programs--especially in technical areas that were
well funded in the past but are now suffering from reductions in defense
spending--and what appears to be an increasing reluctance by society
itself to support its higher education institutions. One sees that in
California--a place that once almost guaranteed access to high-quality
higher education to anyone capable of benefiting from it--financing of
education is under great pressure now.
ER: From your perspective as head of R&D in a major global corporation,
what advice would you give to a college or university president?
Myers: I think the most important thing you can do in R&D is to try to
understand in a quality sense who the customer is for the services that
are provided. I sometimes feel that there have been too many instances
when universities have lost sight of undergraduate education. Even
though I've spent most of the time with graduate education, I really
believe that undergraduate education is the soul of the educational
process. So my basic advice would be pretty simple: If you want your
graduates to find a place in society and in the marketplace, pay a lot
of attention to undergraduate education. If you solve the problem of
providing a high-quality undergraduate education in a manner that both
the student and the institution can afford, addressing the other
institutional issues will become easier.
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