Editing PARC (company) (section)

==Legacy==
Xerox has been heavily criticized, particularly by business historians, for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit PARC's innovations.<ref>{{cite book
 |author1=Douglas K. Smith |author2=Robert C. Alexander 
 |title=Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
 |date=1988|publisher=William Morrow & Co|isbn=978-0688069599}}</ref> Xerox management failed to see the global potential of many of PARC's inventions, but this was mostly a problem with its computing research, a relatively small part of PARC's operations.

One notable example of this is the [[graphical user interface]] (GUI), initially developed at PARC for the Alto and then sold as the [[Xerox Star|Xerox 8010 Information System]] workstation (with office software called Star) by the Xerox Systems Development Department. It heavily influenced future system design, but was deemed a failure because Xerox only sold about 25,000 units of the computer. A small group from PARC led by [[David Liddle]] and [[Charles Irby]] formed [[Metaphor Computer Systems]]. Metaphor Computer Systems extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office-automation model and sold the company to [[IBM]].

Several GUI engineers left to join [[Apple Computer]] to work on [[Apple Lisa|Lisa]] and [[Macintosh]]. Technologies pioneered by its [[materials science|materials scientists]] such as the [[liquid-crystal display]] (LCD), some major innovations in [[optical disc]] technology, and laser printing were actively and successfully introduced by Xerox to the business and consumer markets.<ref>{{cite web |title=Milestones, PARC, a Xerox company |url=http://www.parc.com/about/milestones.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130702222006/http://www.parc.com/about/ |archive-date=July 2, 2013 |access-date=June 14, 2010}}</ref>

[[Microsoft]] co-founder [[Bill Gates]] has said that the Xerox graphical interface has notably influenced Microsoft and Apple. [[Apple Inc.]] co-founder [[Steve Jobs]] said that "Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Robson |first1=David |title=How to avoid the 'competency trap' |url=https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200608-what-is-the-competency-trap |website=BBC |date=June 9, 2020}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=Fried |first1=Ina |title=Bill Gates credits Xerox, not Apple, for Windows |url=https://www.axios.com/bill-gates-credits-xerox-not-apple-for-windows-1513300647-aa8e162f-23a8-47f8-b514-f9d6377ddc51.html |website=Axios |date=February 27, 2017}}</ref>