PARC Signs On A Partner: Fujitsu

leighklotz writes "PARC, which a few years ago was said be be targeted for a spin-off from Xerox, has signed on its first major partner under its new life as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xerox. Fujitsu has announced "Joint Research in Ubiquitous Computing," a three-year sponsored-research plan beginning in January 2005. 'Because we're not a product company, we need a partner like Fujitsu who can deliver our products into the marketplace,' said Teresa Lunt, according to InfoWorld."

Comments

Marketing is important

[sjrstory]

This partnership makes perfect sense for PARC. Marking (or lack thereof) can make or break a company regardless of if they have a good product or not. These days there are so many names and buzz words flying about that serious effort (ie money and advertising talent) must be made to boost brand name recognition.

Re:May I speak for all of Slashdot when...

[sjrstory]

"Because we're not a product company, we need a partner like Fujitsu who can deliver our products into the marketplace"

Fujitsu *IS* a product company, and have a sizable marketing department.

Re:Now, at last

[Neo-Rio-101]

Ummm.... what does Fujitsu make that is broken?

(I've worked with their SPARC and Dual XEON servers. They seem to be doing better than Extreme's network equipment...)

Re:Now, at last

[WIAKywbfatw]

Uh, you know those original IBM keyboards that everyone raves about? They're made by Fujitsu. I had one that was Fujitsu-labelled back in 1991, and it was only a couple of years ago, when I moved house and had to let go of some unused hardware, that it left my possession in full working order.

On a secondary note, notice how Fujitsu is a Japanese company? If keeping the high-tech industry and high-tech jobs in America is such a big deal then why is it that there wasn't a single US company prepared to fight for a partnership with PARC? Granted, IBM is exiting the PC arena but PARC is about more than just developing for the desktop, and I would have thought that the PR benefits of dealing with the home of the GUI would be to die for for Apple, HP or someone similar.

Re:Now, at last

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, guess where 3Com came from. Also, a poor implementation was hardly the reason for the failure of many of the Xerox products. You can scoff all you want at Xerox' poor business sense but you can't criticize PARC's technology implementations.

Who needs others...

[Infonaut]

to stereotype geeks, when we do it so nicely to ourselves.

Re:Now, at last

[phaze3000]

Actually, I've had nothing but good experiences with Fujitsu stuff. I'm a big fan in particlar of the Fujitsu-Siemens notebooks (and as far as I'm aware they're much more Fujitsu than Siemens). They seem to be one of the few companies targetting what I want in a laptop - something that's as small and light as possible whilst still being useful, as opposed to the portable desktops many other people produce (IMO 17" screens are really not suitable for laptops).

I've used a fair few Fujitsu servers without any problems too..

Re:Marking is important

[anagama]

my goodness, I hope (but doubt) that the "interesting" mod is a continuation of the joke posed by the parent post. Somehow though, I think that "insightful" would have been funnier. Someone with mod points willing to correct? hint: mark it "funny".