Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it.

In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products.

I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad).

And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox).

Xerox fermented ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly.

My apologies for rambling.