Dealers of Lightning (56 page)

Some may have been struck more by PARC's unstuffy ambiance. At
one point Jack Goldman barged into an office on the first floor and almost
tripped over Adele Goldberg, nursing her infant daughter inside. In 1978
such informality was unheard-of in a corporate setting and entirely unex­pected. Goldman backed away, embarrassed, never to forget the
moment. Goldberg’s reaction was sharper: "It served him right. The door
was closed and he shouldn't have walked in without knocking."

As for David Kearns, Xerox's future chairman and chief executive
officer, his most vivid impression was of PARC's unkempt and self-
indulgent culture, perpetuated by its isolated and tranquil campus.
"The place," he said later, "just sort of drifted along on its own course."
This impression would not work to PARC's advantage when Kearns s
help and understanding would be needed in a crisis.

The second important consequence of Futures Day was, oddly
enough, the creation of a formal program to commercialize the Alto. Led
by Jerry Elkind, who chose John Ellenby as one of his top lieutenants, the
new venture was empowered to dribble Altos into the marketplace by
offering them to select customers on stringent terms.

As crafted by Jack Goldman, the charter of the Advanced Systems
Division, or ASD, would be the mirror image of that of the SDD unit
building the Star. Where David Liddle's team was assembling an arsenal
of maximum firepower to deploy in the market only after everything was
in place—quite similar to the bottomless money pit Ellenby had so tact­lessly described to Peter McColough—ASD could weave and dart like a
PT boat, using whatever ammunition it found handy to keep a few key
buyers intrigued. Ellenby liked to compare the arrangement to the Nor­mandy invasion, with Liddle as a General Eisenhower tolerating an
experimental foray or two to reconnoiter the beaches. Liddle implicitly
acknowledged the metaphor: "We were very deliberately strategic," he
said. "ASD was tactical."

The new division solved two of PARC's most pressing problems. First,
it indulged the veterans of Futures Day by giving them a chance to prove
the Alto's commercial viability. Perhaps more important, it gave Jerry
Elkind a place to go.

Elkind had only recently returned to PARC from a temporary assign­
ment to the
corporate engineering
staff. It
was not a joyful homecom­
ing. His
absence had not only distanced him further from the daily
routine of the computer science lab,
but
also underscored the gulf
between
his management style and
Taylor's.

For
a long time it had been evident
he
could not hope to compete
with Taylor
for the affection of most of
the lab
personnel.
One
prob­
lem
was that he comported himself as
their
equal in technical ability,
something which Taylor would never
presume
and which
was
bound to
annoy the egotistical staff even if it were
true.
Moreover, he continu­
ally reminded
the Computer Science
Lab that
for all its independence
and
arrogance, it belonged to a larger organization,
PARC,
which
was
in turn beholden to yet a greater entity,
Xerox.
Taylor, by comparison,
behaved
as though
CSL
was the sun
around
which
PARC, Xerox,
and
indeed
all known computer science
revolved.

"I
took a much less aggressive stance
with
respect to the resource
issues,
and
I
would hope a less antagonizing stance, than
Bob
did,"
Elkind
said later.
"In
times when
you're competing
for resources
I always
had to make the argument with
Bob that there
was
such a thing as
a
fair
share."

Perhaps
the greatest friction point
was Elkind's
frequently blunt and
condescending temperament. One
could argue
that in
this he
scarcely
differed
from Butler Lampson or, indeed,
Taylor
himself.
But as
long
as Elkind
lacked the former's intellectual
charisma
and the latter's sym­pathetic paternalism, many at
PARC would
not consider him authori­
tative,
just officious.

"Jerry
had a shorthand in his management style
I
never could appre­
ciate,"
said
Ed
McCreight, as mild and
complaisant
a person as anyone
who ever
walked
CSL's
hallways.
"He'd
come into my office and say, in
effect, 'I
don't think you're doing anything important.'
It was
his
way
of
saying, 'Explain how this fits into the grander scheme,' but it made you
get
down
on
yourself."

Some
of McCreight's colleagues like
Jim Mitchell
did not feel
demeaned, just infuriated. "Jerry would always say,
'Let
me play devil's
advocate,'" he said. "But that was all he goddam did!
Every
time you
went
to him he was always telling you what was
wrong with your ideas, so most of us stopped going to him. I told him once, 'Jerry when that's all you do its kind of a downer. You need to be going "rah, rah" sometimes, too, not just being a devil’s advocate.' He was technical
but he wasn't as
smart as any of us, and we knew it. He should have, too."

Elkind's manner would not have polarized the lab as much if he had not
had his fans, too. Several CSL staff members were quite comfortable
with Elkind's style. This group included Dan Bobrow and Warren Teitelman, both recruits from Elkind's old firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, as
well as Peter Deutsch and Bob Metcalfe, the last of whom had known
Elkind at MIT and considered him "a fine man, a gentleman, and an
intellectual."

But they were a minority. Considered strictly as the laboratory's chief,
Jerry Elkind was an increasingly isolated figure. While he was away for an
extended assignment to a corporate task force in 1977, the notion arose
that the lab might function just as well without him. One day after Taylor
had been running CSL unhampered for several months, McCreight
remembered, Bob Sproull walked into his office.

"Ed, have you noticed anything different in the atmosphere recently?"
he asked.

"You know," McCreight replied, "I sort of enjoy having Bob run the
place."

"You're not the only one who feels that way."

As Mitchell recalled, "Every one of us noticed the difference in feel­ing in the lab. We all felt more productive, and we sure as hell liked the
atmosphere a lot better."

With the end of Elkind's assignment nearing, several CSL engineers
visited Pake to ask him to find Elkind a new home. Taylor, wisely, laid
low. But Pake was convinced he knew who was behind the move.
"While Jerry was gone, Taylor really did settle in," he recalled. "And he
did definitely consolidate his position."

The situation confronted Pake with an unappetizing prospect. He had
come to rely on Elkind as a buffer between Taylor and the other lab
chiefs. Sure enough, during Elkind's absence the tensions between the
physicists and computer scientists had increased, aggravated by Taylor's
oft-expressed
view that only the
computer
labs (and specifically
CSL)
did
any work worth financing at PARC.
The
surge of petty antagonism had all
but
destroyed
Pake's
dream of a multidisciplinaiy Utopia
on Coyote Hill.

(The CSL
engineer Jim
Morris
recalled being cornered at a party in
town one
night by a
GSL
physicist.
"How
does it feel to
be
working for
a
boss who
doesn't have a
Ph.D.?" the
physicist gibed.
"At
the time
I
thought that was an asinine
remark to make," Morris
said, "but
it
did
reflect
the interdisciplinary pissing match
that
was going on at
PARC.")

Pake
himself had reached
the point where he
could barely stand the
sight of Taylor, much less engage him
in
conversation.
He
disliked
Tay­lor's
individualistic management
technique
and was even more
appalled
by
the feral dynamics of
Dealer. On
the whole, he was unper
suaded by
the argument that good
researchers
should be able to take
criticism
in the same spirit in which
they
dished it out.
The
white-
suited
physicists and optical scientists
on the
ground floor of the build­
ing—
his people
—
were every bit as
uncompromising
in their scientific
standards
as Taylor's, but
they
did not
feel
constrained to abandon all
civility
as
CSL
did.