Why Did Xerox's Alto Pricing Fail?
Kodak's Second Cousin: The $40,000 Future
📜 What Happened
When Xerox finally commercialized its revolutionary PARC technology as the Star workstation, it priced the future at $16,500 per unit (≈$50k today) — needing whole networked office installations of $100k+. The same year, IBM's crude beige PC launched at $1,565. The Star was a decade ahead in capability and a decade behind in understanding who buys computers and how. Two years later Apple's Lisa repeated the pricing mistake; the Mac finally got it right — with Xerox's own ideas.
☠️ The Fatal Mistake
Priced like the mainframe business they knew instead of the personal revolution they'd invented — capability without accessibility.
🧠 The Lesson (Free for You)
Being 10x better at 10x the price loses to 'good enough' at everyman prices. Adoption curves are written by accountants, not engineers.
📕 The Antidote Book
Christensen's Harvard research began with a paradox: why do well-run market leaders — companies that listen to customers, invest in R&D, and chase profits rationally — get destroyed by scrappy newcomers with WORSE…
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