Xerox, the document Company, has a natural fondness for paper. In a time when the "paperless office" is agreed to have been a comically wrongheaded vision and when paper-and-ink metaphors persist even in cyber-space (e.g., Web "pages"), that's probably good business. Xerox's loyalty to paper as a medium, however, has contributed to some notorious strategic blunders.

The biggest may have been the hostility the company showed toward the ideas coming out of its own unruly Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s. Between 1971 and 1979, PARC scientists invented the first truly personal computer, the first windows-based graphical user interface, the first user-friendly word processing program, the first adjustable screen and printer fonts, the computer mouse, the laser printer, and the Ethernet networking protocol to tie local computers together. These technologies make up the backbone of the modern office, yet only the laser printer was commercialized by Xerox. Company executives, blinded by their own mindsets as copier salesmen, forfeited many of the best people and prototypes at PARC to the next-generation firms that shepherded in the era of personal computing, such as Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and 3Com.