Xerox was a photo copier company. Actually, they were more of a photo copy company as most of their revenue came from charging the customer by they number of pages photo copied. This was the lens through which they looked at what was being produced at PARC, how is this going to cause my customer to need to make more photo copies. How is having working RPCs going to result in more photo copies being made?

Computing just wasn't in their DNA and those people at Xerox who did see the potential in PARC never had the leverage to reorient the company to take advantage. This is almost always the result when a for profit corporation invests in fundamental research that is not intimately related to their primary revenue source.