Xerox Star - Marketing and Commercial Reception

Marketing and Commercial Reception

The Xerox Star was not originally meant to be a stand-alone computer, but to be part of an integrated Xerox "personal office system" that also connected to other workstations and network services via Ethernet. Although a single unit sold for $16,000, a typical office would have to purchase at least 2 or 3 machines along with a file server and a name server/print server. Spending $50,000 to $100,000 for a complete installation was not an easy sell, when a secretary's annual salary was about $12,000 and a Commodore VIC-20 cost around $300.

Later incarnations of the Star would allow users to purchase a single unit with a laser printer, but even so only about 25,000 units were sold, leading many to consider the Xerox Star to be a commercial failure.

The workstation was originally designed to run the Star software for performing office tasks, but it was also sold with different software for other markets. These other configurations included an Interlisp workstation, Smalltalk workstation, and a server.

Some have said that the Star was ahead of its time, that few outside of a small circle of developers really understood the potential of the system, considering that IBM introduced their 8088-based IBM PC running the comparatively primitive PC-DOS the same year that the Star was brought to market. However, comparison with the IBM PC may be irrelevant: well before it was launched, buyers in the Word Processing industry were aware of the 8086-based IBM Displaywriter, the full-page portrait black-on-white Xerox 850 page display system and the 120 page-per-minute Xerox 9700 laser printer. Furthermore, the design principles of Smalltalk and modeless working had been extensively discussed in the August 1981 issue of BYTE magazine, so Xerox PARC's standing and the potential of the Star can scarcely have been lost on its target (office systems) market, who would never have expected IBM to position a mass-market PC to threaten far more profitable dedicated WP systems. Unfortunately, the influential niche market of pioneering players in electronic publishing such as Longman were already aligning their production processes towards generic markup languages such as SGML (forerunner of HTML and XML) whereby authors using inexpensive offline systems could describe document structure, making their manuscripts ready for transfer to computer to film systems that offered far higher resolution than the then-current maximum of 360 dpi laser printing technologies.

Another possible reason given for the lack of success of the Star was the corporate structure of Xerox itself. A longtime copier company, Xerox played to their strengths. They already had one significant failure under their belt in making their acquisition of Scientific Data Systems pay off. It is said that there were internal jealousies between the old line copier systems divisions that were responsible for bulk of Xerox's revenues and the new upstart division. Their marketing efforts were seen by some as half-hearted or unfocused. Furthermore, the most technically savvy sales representatives that might have sold office automation equipment were paid large commissions on leases of laser printer equipment costing up to a half-million dollars. No commission structure for 'decentralized' systems could compete. The multi-lingual technical documentation market was also a major opportunity, but this required cross-border collaboration for which few sales organisations were ready at this time.

Probably most significantly, strategic planners at the Xerox Systems Group (XSG) did not feel that they could compete against other workstation manufacturers such as Apollo Computer or Symbolics. The Xerox name alone was considered their greatest asset, but it did not produce customers.

Finally, by today's standards, the system would be considered very slow, in part due to the limited hardware of the era, and in part due to a poorly implemented file system; saving a large file could take minutes. Crashes could be followed by an hours-long process called "file scavenging", signaled by the appearance of the diagnostic code '7511' in the top left corner of the screen.

In the end the Star's unsatisfactory commercial reception probably came down to price, performance in demonstrations, and weakness of sales channels. To give credit to Xerox, they did try many things in an attempt to jumpstart sales. The next release of Star was on a different, more efficient hardware platform, Daybreak, using a new, faster processor, and accompanied by significant rewriting of the Star software, renamed ViewPoint, to improve performance. The new system, dubbed the Xerox 6085 PCS, was released in 1985. The new hardware provided 1MB to 4MB of memory, a 10MB to 80MB hard disk, a 15" or 19" display, a 5.25" floppy drive, a mouse, Ethernet connector and a price of a little over $6,000.

The Xerox 6085 could be sold along with an attached laser printer as a standalone system. Also offered was a PC compatibility mode via an 80186-based expansion board. Users could transfer files between the ViewPoint system and PC-based software, albeit with some difficulty because the file formats were not compatible with any on the PC. But even with a significantly reduced price, it was still a Rolls Royce in the world of inexpensive $2,000 personal computers.

In 1989, Viewpoint 2.0 introduced many new applications related to desktop publishing. Eventually, Xerox jettisoned the integrated hardware/software workstation offered by Viewpoint and offered a software-only product called GlobalView, providing the Star interface and technology on an IBM PC compatible platform. The initial release required the installation of a MESA CPU add-on board. The final release of GlobalView 2.1 ran as an emulator on top of Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows 98 and was released in 1996.