Stewart Brand

And I should not have paid a sale price.

Back in the day, Xerox was one of the first companies to sort of discover, how about we continue to own the copiers that you get from us, and you lease them, but we own them.

And by the way, then we can take the amortized tax write-off on it, and you can't.

But we're then responsible for keeping it working.

And they did that not as well as they needed to because the early copiers were really, really flaky.

They were great, and Xerox became an enormously famous and rich corporation, and then they lost it, partly because it was just mismanagement in various directions, but they mismanaged the technicians that were repairing people's copiers, and that's why they didn't make it.

Yeah, and it's tricky because you can see from the company standpoint, if you control everything about the ongoing usage and upkeep and so on of these particular devices and you don't let non-company people fix them or the owners fix them,

um you get a lot more income and often it is uh like car sales the dealerships for cars up until when tesla came along were making more money off of fixing their cars than off of selling them and um

which also puts incentives in a funny place, because then you sort of want them to need service, and so you might design them in ways that look great, but after two months, you're going to have to go into the shop, and they own the shop, and they own the parts, and so it goes.

But it's short-term gain.

This is kind of one of those acidification issues that once you're successful enough to really sort of control a domain of stuff and customers, the temptation is to start trying to extract rents.

That is basically unearned income from the system.

If that's what you're counting, and that's what the senior executives tend to do, certainly what happened at Xerox, we want to have the least expense and the most income because we all got these tremendous bonuses, and that's what we're living for, and that's what we're measuring, and that's what is more important to us than satisfied customers.

satisfied customers are necessary in the long run.

So it's a short gain versus the long loyalty that is the

mix there and it's kind of like it's easy to forget what's fundamental, which is that you've got to have satisfied customers and they will come and get you after a while if they're not satisfied.

Well, this turned out to be the answer to a question I got a lot because I started a thing called the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 60s that had a lot of impact.

And people say, well, gosh, we really need that now.

Why don't you do the Whole Earth Catalog again?

And I can answer with a happy, freed grin that I don't need to do that because YouTube has done that.