Dealers of Lightning (79 page)

"Bob said, 'I've never heard any of
this
before,'" Spencer said.
" 'Nobody's ever told me what I did wrong.
I'm
sorry,
I
didn't know that
I
was doing these things. I'll change and it will never happen again.' Every­body thought, "Wow! We've solved the problem. Now we can go back and
start doing research.'"

But Taylor did not come away from the retreat with the same perspec­tive. What he had chosen to hear was not a blanket condemnation of his
personal behavior, only a rehashing of a few old incidents about which no
one had ever directly complained to him before. On those terms he was
perfectly willing to apologize for any inadvertent misunderstandings and
let bygones be bygones.

In any case, the era of good feelings did not last long. The very next day
Taylor showed up
in
Spencers office. As Spencer recalls this encounter,
Taylor all but disavowed every promise he had made. "Don't believe any-
tiring you heard last night," he said, leaving Spencer dumbfounded.
"That isn't the way it's going to be."

Taylor recalls having a distinctly different agenda. He said he was
merely anxious to set Spencer straight on some incidents in which he
thought he had been cast unfairly as the villain. "I certainly did not tell
him, 'Hey, I was just bullshitting when I said such and such.'"

Either way, it was obvious that the Pajaro Dunes bloodletting had
not produced the catharsis Spencer had hoped for. Whatever Taylor
thought of the recent confrontation, clearly he was not committed to
improving his intramural relationships. Spencer was fed up. He was
determined to lay down the law, in writing, and give Taylor a hard
deadline to alter his behavior.

A few days later he summoned Taylor to his office for a formal read­ing out of his alleged violations of good corporate conduct. He ordered
Taylor to end any contact he had with competing companies; to reor­ganize his lab into sections and create an intermediate level of man­agement to supervise them; to stop denigrating the other PARC labs
and their work; and, most humiliating, to report to Spencer's office
every Monday at 9
a.m
. to discuss his progress toward those goals.

Failure to fulfill those terms, Spencer said stiffly, could result in Taylor's
termination. Then he sent Taylor away with a written memo reflecting
what he had said, along with the injunction that the document was confi­dential and he was not to discuss its contents with anyone.

But for Taylor to leave his own people in the dark was unthinkable.
Before the end of the day he called his closest advisors, including
Thacker, Mitchell, and Ornstein, to his house in Palo Alto, where he
handed Spencer's memo around. He appeared stunned and dejected, as
though recognizing that the final act in his Xerox career was playing out.

"I don't know what's going to happen, but the handwritings on the
wall," he told them. He seemed to take particular umbrage at the
injunction to cease seeking a deal with another company, an offense of
which he insisted he was innocent. "That's like telling me to stop beat­ing my wife," he said.

Spencer's memo prompted Taylor’s supporters to stage another round of
appeals to Pake, this time with explicit warnings that the upshot of forcing
Taylor out would be wholesale resignations from CSL. "A whole bunch of
people who were in a position to know went to them and veiy carefully
explained what was going to happen if they did this," Lampson said. "And
they didn't believe us, even though it was perfecdy obvious that we were
the source of knowledge on this subject because we were the people who
were going to leave. They didn't believe us, or they didn't care."

Taylor himself figured diere was only one avenue of appeal: directly to
David Kearns. Spencer had already apprised Kearns, by now the Xerox
CEO, of the impending storm by sending him a copy of the memo with
the notation that he expected Keams to back him up on the conditions
therein. Otherwise one of them—Spencer or Taylor—would have to go
"and he could choose which one." When Taylor asked for a meeting
Kearns deputed his chief technical officer, Sandy Campbell, to mediate
the quarrel.

Campbell called Spencer and Taylor to Stamford for a marathon par­ley aimed at resolving the battle "based on the principle," as Spencer
put it, "of who had the bigger bladder." Convening in Campbell's office
at eight-thirty in the morning, they aired their grievances without
respite, fueled only by coffee and Dr Pepper. All the old issues took
their turn on the stage: Taylor's arrogance, his demand for a dispropor­tionate share of the budget, his failure to develop managerial talent on
his staff. Spencer further suggested that Taylor by his intransigence
had actually impeded technology transfer at Xerox.

"My response was that there was more technology transfer from
CSL to SDD than ever in the history of computing," Taylor recalled,
"because every tool SDD used they got from us."

"But SDD failed," Spencer said.

"That's not my fault," Taylor snapped back. "I was hired to produce
the best technology I could. If the product group was not able to take
advantage of our technology a lot of people are culpable, not me."

Finally Spencer accused Taylor of making his memo public in con­travention of a direct order. By then it was two in the afternoon and
they had been hard at it for more than five hours.

"Did you do that?" Campbell asked Taylor.

"Sure I did," Taylor replied breezily. And why not? "Could anyone be
foolish enough to think that this guy was going to tell me to change the
way I operated and I'm not going to explain that to the lab?" he remarked
later. "That's stupid."

On that note, Campbell broke up the meeting. Taylor and Spencer
shared a corporate car to New York's Kennedy Airport without exchang­ing a single word during the more-than-hour-long trip. On the commer­cial flight home that evening they sat far apart, silently preparing for the
final confrontation.

Taylor had tipped the Greybeards in advance to his agenda when he
summoned his lab the following Monday morning, September 19, to the
beanbag room. The rest of CSL could only guess why Taylor had called
Dealer for such an unusual day and hour. They listened in mounting con­sternation as the only boss many of them had ever known recapitulated the
high points of his career, teary-eyed and emotional. Several of his points he
had earlier made in a separate memo to Spencer, who was present.

"Most people spend a lifetime without opportunities for pioneering
completely new ways of thinking about large collections of ideas," he
said. "I have been fortunate to have been a leader in three: time­sharing; long-distance interactive networking; and personal distributed
computing."

Under Spencer's uneasy gaze, Taylor proceeded to rehash the recent
sequence of meetings and confrontations. Then came the fatal words.

"I want you all to know I've handed in my resignation," he said, and
walked out.

A stunned hush descended on the room. Spencer unwisely took the
floor and, as one participant later remembered, "tried to continue the
meeting as though what had happened was routine and it was now time
to move on to new business."

Instead the room exploded in fury, all of it aimed directly at him. "I
have never watched a grown man be shat upon like that by forty people
at once," said Severo Ornstein. "I almost
felt
sorry for him—except that I
was so angry at him."

The desperate Spencer tried to hold his own against an audience
with all the forbearance of a lynch mob. He argued that Taylor’s depar­ture need not represent a major shift in the way the lab was run or a
change in their work, that it was
a
temporary blip soon to be overcome.
No one was buying the line. Suddenly a stentorian voice rang out.

"This is
bullshit!"

All heads swiveled to the source of the outburst. Chuck Thacker had
risen to his feet. In the most precise terms an engineers engineer
could summon to his lips at that fervid moment, he informed Spencer
that he had just committed the gravest mistake of his life. His eyes
swept the room. He said he hoped what he was about to do would not
be taken as a model or a hint to anyone else; it was a personal state­ment and he wished it to be viewed that way.

Then he said, "I resign," and followed Taylor out the door.

Spencer was dumbfounded. Taylor’s resignation he was prepared for;
Thacker's came out of nowhere. As the meeting erupted in further
recriminations he lost what remained of his grip.

"What can I do to rectify this?" he asked aloud.

A
voice from the back of the room, over by the whiteboards
—
he
never learned whose it was—called out: "You can fucking
resignl"

His jaw set, Spencer replied, "The company made this choice, not
me." Shaken and humiliated, he departed.

"Spencer fired Taylor," Butler Lampson said later. "Taylor got fired,
he didn't resign, no matter what you think happened technically. They
created an environment within which he had to resign. They told him,
you must do the following twelve things. Basically what it came down
to was going into Bill Spencer's office every Monday morning to lick
his boots."

Kearns, to his credit, granted the Greybeards' subsequent request
for an emergency audience. Presumably he was aware of how Taylor's
ouster had played in the computer science community, because he had
been inundated with telegrams and letters from dozens of top aca­demic researchers—as though Taylor's entire
ARPA
army had risen in
protest. Nevertheless, as the commanding officer of a company locked
in apocalyptic battle with the Japanese, his sympathy for the self-indulgent eggheads of
PARC
was necessarily restrained. He preferred
to view the flap as the unfortunate result of an executive's ordering a
subordinate quite properly to get with the program. If Taylor refused,
he had to go.

For their part, the Greybeards were under no great illusion that Kearns
would overrule Spencer. The very episode carried within itself its own
irrevocability; as Ornstein reflected,
a
reinstated Taylor would have been
"completely unmanageable."
But
having flown East on the principle that
silence would only be worse, they went through with it.