Saturday, March 28, 2009

The Mac GUI, Adobe Postscript and Erasable Paper

Back in the 1990's I scrapped together some money from my print brokerage. Since the only thing I really knew about was printing, I bought three stocks for the IRA with a buy and hold strategy, I was too busy earning money to get involved in the casino.

The three stocks were Adobe, Apple and Xerox. It seemed so natural at the time. Sooner or later, I figured someone would figure out how to fix the silly accounting of Xerox. I was not disappointed when Anne started running the store. I was sure that once that was out of the way, it would turn out that I was really smart.

Two out of three are not bad. I'm doing ok with Adobe and Apple. On Xerox I've seen 66% of my investment disappear. The irony of course is that the GUI and Postscript were invented at Xerox Parc.

I still feel ok about Xerox over the long haul. But while erasable paper is lost somewhere in the Xerox pipeline, I did a google search on Ricoh + Erasable paper. Try it yourself and see what you get.

I'm still betting that erasable paper will scale in MPS through innovation done by some team of engineers and product designers in India or New Zealand, maybe living at Fuji Xerox , or maybe cut loose from PARC.

What a shame for my home team.

Go Mets!

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