Xerox's Lab Was Years Ahead of Apple and Microsoft. What Is Xerox Worth Now?

Xerox opened its Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in 1970. In 1973 PARC designed the Alto, a computer with a graphical interface, windows and a mouse, and created Ethernet to link computers; PARC also developed laser printing. The mouse itself came from SRI, where the first one was built in 1964. In December 1979 Apple engineers and CEO Steve Jobs visited PARC; the Computer History Museum says the Alto influenced Apple's Macintosh, which came out in 1984. Microsoft's Windows 1.0 followed in November 1985. Xerox did profit from PARC: some of its inventions generated billions of dollars in sales for Xerox, the Computer History Museum says. But Xerox's revenue fell from about $19.0 billion in 1999 to $7.0 billion in 2025, a year that includes Lexmark from July. In February 1999 the Xerox shares held by outside investors were worth about $39.7 billion; on October 23, 2026, the whole company was worth about $336 million. Apple was worth about $5.07 trillion that day, roughly 15,000 times more, and Microsoft about $3.89 trillion.