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Xerox Cedes Control To Fujifilm, Ending Its Independence (bloomberg.com)
mikeebbbd writes: According to Bloomberg, "Xerox, a once-iconic American innovator that became synonymous with office copy machines, is ceding control to Japan's Fujifilm in a deal that creates an $18 billion company." Essentially, it's merging with Fujifilm; a former joint venture operating in the Asian-Pacific area essentially will become the parent company... So much for the company that actually invented the modern graphical user interface later popularized by Apple and Microsoft. "The agreement marks the end of independence for a U.S. company whose roots trace back to the start of the 20th century," reports Bloomberg. "The joint venture will cut 10,000 jobs in Asia as part of the restructuring as the Japanese company struggles with an 'increasingly severe' market environment." While the new company will have a combined revenue of $18 billion, Xerox was acquired by Fujifilm for $6.1 billion.
How many billions has Xerox wasted on acquisitions and mergers in the past 10 years?
I worked for a company that Xerox bought, and then three years later Xerox sold most of us to a different company, and spun off the rest to a new company.
Ursula Burns, just like Meg Whitman, ruined a great company.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The seeds of Xerox’s destruction were sown well before Ms. Burns.
Start with the company’s geographic layout. The heart and soul of Xerox was in Rochester, NY, where the company’s manufacturing plant and xerographic engineers resided. The majority of Xerox employees were in Rochester. But in 1969, the company moved its corporate headquarters and executives to Stamford, CT. While engineers may dream of having the suits an eight-hour drive away, I think it divorced management from operations. You can’t effectively manage a company when you have no idea what goes on there every day.
Locating the R&D labs on the other side of the country probably didn’t help, either. True, Palo Alto was in the heart of Silicon Valley innovation, but at the time Rochester wasn’t exactly a scientific slouch. “Out of sight, out of mind” was a big factor in how Xerox execs treated PARC.
And the management wasn’t great even in the mid-90s. Half-baked ideas from on high were a constant annoyance when I worked there. For example, Xerox offered the Total Satisfaction Guarantee: If for any reason you aren’t satisfied with your Xerox device, Xerox will replace it with an identical model or a current model with comparable features for three years after purchase. Xerox released the model 4900 color laser printer. A year later, they brought out the model 4915, which was much improved—but had identical hardware. A 4900 could be upgraded to a 4915 with a few stickers and a new ROM DIMM. Management wanted to charge users for the upgrade kit. It didn’t take long for customers to figure out that they could “TSG” their year-old 4900, and the free replacement would be a 4915. It took a while for management to figure out that the costs involved with sending a technician to pack up the large, heavy 4900 and replace it with a brand-new 4915 far exceeded the cost of mailing out a ROM DIMM and a few stickers.
The TSG was a great sales tool, because it made buying the more-expensive Xerox equipment risk-free. But Xerox didn’t think through the implications of the guarantee: that it enabled free trade-ins for upgraded equipment, that equipment needed to be bulletproof to avoid a stream of TSG calls due to product flaws (DocuPrint, I’m looking at you), and how it would eat into what would otherwise be a very healthy profit margin supposedly justified by the Xerox brand.