September 23, 1990

YOU KNOW you’re turning into a total nerd when you actually get excited about things like electronic documents. I realized this odd self-truth last week as I listened to the latest pitch from Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Sun Microsystems, which just announced the fruits of their labor: a Xerox-labeled, Sun-built SPARCstation (the PARC SPARC?) with Xerox’s special GlobalView environment for workgroup computing.

I thought it significant that Xerox hosted the announcement at PARC’s campus. Known around the world as the home of the WIMP interface — windows, icons, mice and pointers — it was neat to watch Xerox re-establish itself as a player, shedding a different kind of “wimp” image as a company that lets its innovations slip out of its labs into the hands of companies that make millions of dollars off them.

Its effort is two-pronged. One, PARC hired a couple of IBM Corp.’s best marketers and technologists. Bill Lowe, executive VP of development and manufacturing for Xerox, is a 26-year IBM veteran and former head of the Entry Systems (PC) Division; Dennis Andrews, another IBM vet, is a development and manufacturing VP for Xerox’s system software unit whose last job at Big Blue was as vice president of the Advanced Workstation Division. Two, the fickle computer industry finally realized that the graphical interfaces that Xerox pioneered in the 1970s are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

So Xerox is now determined to drive its innovations into profitability in the ’90s with a revamped strategy which revolves around “The Document,” a good idea for a firm which made its billions reproducing them.

However, this is a different document than the one that you and I pore over at our desks. It’s not a sheaf of stapled paper, though it could be. Nor is it necessarily a single blob of data sitting on your computer disk. The document of the 1990s is “compound,” capable of incorporating many different types of digital data that can be used in many different ways.

In Xerox’s present strategy, this includes text and numbers and graphics. In the future, other types of data — including sound, video and animation — will be part of the document as well.

A move in this direction is a leap toward real business productivity. The network and software that link Xerox’s computers makes it as easy to send a document to Australia as to your office mate. On that now-familiar “desktop metaphor,” a document icon can simply be highlighted with the mouse, and “dragged” to wherever you want it to go. If that happens to be the icon labeled “Koala,” or whatever represents your Aussie co-worker’s desk on the network — Boom! it’s there. No paper. No fax. No FedEx. No diskette mailing. And instead of trying to translate something from its electronic form into something that can be seen on paper, you can give your co-workers a universe of information that’s fully useful to them immediately.

John Seely Brown, visionary vice president of advanced research for PARC, believes that ideas today get forced through the linear bottleneck of paper documents, and this is something he’s trying to remedy.

“Today’s documents are dehydrated ideas for storage,” he says. Instead he sees documents becoming part of what he calls “docuspace — a spiral galaxy of information in (many) dimensions, including time.” This means that a compound document will be able to contain all its previous incarnations — the first spreadsheet you did that was badly over budget, the many revisions by all the people you showed it to, and the final that went to the boss; all the memos, and a video explaining why you simply must have an extra $250,000 in fiscal 1991.

The perennial question, “Who has the file?,” will go the way of the manual typewriter in the office of the 1990s. “You will always have the file,” says Brown — in docuspace, accessible via network from anywhere in the world at any time.

And as it becomes easier to squirt large blobs of data like sound, video and animation across networks, efficiency will be increased just that much more. Imagine creating a multimedia presentation on your computer and broadcasting it on your company’s international network without having to print it out, have slides made, send a video tape, etc. etc.

This concept, the concept of workgroup computing, is absolutely the next step. Xerox is even repeating a buzzword coining by Steve Jobs. They say we’re at the dawning of “interpersonal computing,” as opposed to personal computing, where we use the computer not as a means of improving tasks like typing documents or ciphering numbers, but as a superior means of fast, high-quality communication with our co-workers. In an era of global stress and competition, this ability is worth its weight in gold.