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Xerox Cedes Control To Fujifilm, Ending Its Independence (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the end-of-an-era dept.

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.

30 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. MoAD by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thanks for all the R&D over the years.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    1. Re:MoAD by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I was there one day and walked by an office that said John von Neumann. I don't think he showed up very often.

      What a poster boy for not allowing the accountants to run the business. They owned 30 years of the future of computing, and squandered every bit. They could have been Apple and a few other companies, combined.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    2. Re:MoAD by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      Apple and Microsoft are crying that they'll have nobody to steal ideas from now.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re:MoAD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > Thanks for all the R&D over the years.

      Yeah, I'd like to join you, and even add something, too.

      My kid (7yo) got one of those cardboard glasses at school and his teacher just gave it to the students and said nothing. Maybe it was meant to be a surprise, maybe she didn't manage to make it work.

      We were supposed to assemble it. But what next? In a phrase, it took me quite a bit of an investigation till we got it to work as intended by Google.

      The day before my son was "Meh", "Yeah, it's OK"... when things got working together, he went "Oh", "Ah", "Wow" etc.

      If only I could show Linux they way it is now to the young me back then, I bet I'd be silent -- and thinking "wow" for at least one day. And guess what? Nothing was too revolutionary when taken in isolation, but those guys back them could see the synergy. They could it see it clearly and assembled things to bring light to those of us who dwelled in the shadows.

      Luckily there were a few who thought about taking the ideas and make it happen (like Woz and Jobs). Luckily someone was smart enough to know who to follow (like BG). Perhaps we should even thank BG a lot for noticing a main aspect of the inventions: they were meant to be cheap, to be easily manufactured when RAM price dropped enough.

      We really don't do justice to those pioneers, because most of us could not see the true value of the innovations -- until they became ubiquitous and people started to take them for granted.

      I hope Fujifilm can understand that and rekindle that spirit again.

    4. Re:MoAD by jonwil · · Score: 2

      If you want to read more about the backstory behind Xerox PARC and what went on, go read "The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", its got a whole section covering what went on at PARC.

      There is no way the Xerox Alto (or some derivative of it) would have been profitable as a commercial product back in 1971, the cost to build one was too high. Even as late as 1981 when the Alto-derived Xerox Star machine came on the market, units were being sold for as high as $16k (far more than things like the VIC-20 and Apple II were selling for)

      Plus, Xerox had a number of problems at that point that they had to deal with. On the one hand they had the US government looking into whether they were abusing their market dominance but at the same time new players out of Japan and elsewhere were challenging that dominance. The management was focused on how they could convince the DOJ that they weren't abusing their market power whilst at the same time finding new ways to use that market power to get their new competitors out of the market.

      Yes there were things that Xerox upper management got wrong but there was no way the "Xerox Office" (Altos plus laser printers plus Ethernet plus whatever else) would have worked as a product in 1973 given the high cost of production.

    5. Re:MoAD by neoRUR · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And what did it take to change the whole Future of Computing?

      One Guy, who attended the PARC meetings. ( I was at a few, many years later.)

      This one guy would show off his home made "Computer" with these cheap chips that he would make do things that the chip makers didn't think was possible.
      And he made it so inexpensive that everyone would eventually have it.

      The Innovation and Synergy was there in those people and the enthusiasm of building these things for fun is really what drives the future.
      Yes it took someone else with a business sense to bring it to the market and not get ripped off or sucked into a larger company.

      The innovation is still here, if you have the passion to look beyond the normal.
      The cycle will continue with these new companies replacing the larger ones now in new markets.

      Steve 'Woz' is the guy and there should be a statue of him.

    6. Re:MoAD by UnixUnix · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The executives who had wanted Xerox to go the computer route having lost the boardroom war would have been fired had they been in just about any other company. But Xerox back then took pride in never firing anybody; so in my consulting work (Xerox El Segundo) I got to meet and work with some said executives who had been demoted to engineers, and heard about the winners' motto ("we are a xerographic company!"), as well as tales of what might have been.

    7. Re:MoAD by k6mfw · · Score: 1

      I'm thinking of the movie about Steve Jobs has a scene where he and his group walking towards the PARC office. People inside, "don't let him in or he will steal all our secrets!" or some phrase like that. Later in same movie, Bill Gates pushing what looks like a LISA on a cart yelling, "I want this in our Microsoft products!"

      --
      mfwright@batnet.com
    8. Re:MoAD by SimonStu · · Score: 1

      Amen, brother!

    9. Re:MoAD by NikeHerc · · Score: 1

      The executives who had wanted Xerox to go the computer route ...

      Xerox went the computer route! They purchased Scientific Data Systems (SDS) from Max Palevsky in 1969 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Palevsky). SDS (renamed Xerox Data Systems or XDS) was based in El Segundo. Was this before your time?

      --
      Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
  2. does it replace verb? by kiviQr · · Score: 3, Funny

    great now I will have to Fuji my documents...

    1. Re:does it replace verb? by zlives · · Score: 5, Funny

      the correct term going forward is FuX those docs

  3. Can you send me a fujifilm on my X11? by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 1

    Ok, that's not going to fly.

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  4. The End of another chapter by AlejandroTejadaC · · Score: 1

    This transaction closes another chapter in the Big Blue Book of Missed Opportunities: https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... Just one question: How much Xerox paid to their Top Executives (in the 70's and 80's) for squandering their world changing technical discoveries?

    1. Re:The End of another chapter by Nutria · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
    2. Re:The End of another chapter by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2

      HP was ruined before Meg came along. It was very frustrating being there during a few of the Carly years and being completely unable to do anything about what was so obviously happening to the company. HP's DNA was in what left to become Agilent. But that was high-margin, low unit count stuff that the management who remained at HP wasn't interested in any longer, even though it contained all of the real innovation in the company.

      Everything after that was another step downward. Not saying that Meg did not do damage or that it would not have been bad to be there while she did.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    3. Re:The End of another chapter by Nutria · · Score: 1

      Gah,you're absolutely right. It's was Carly "I Wanna Be President" Fiorina.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    4. Re:The End of another chapter by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 1

      I think that decision was before her. Carly's dumb move was to buy Compaq.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  5. Anyone know Xerox's business these days? by 2ms · · Score: 1

    I wonder what Xerox does these days. Do you still have anything like PARC? I know offices still use Xerox machines but still I would think business in that area would still be much smaller than it used to be with the emphasis on paperless. No one use copy machines at home anymore they do everything digital.

    1. Re:Anyone know Xerox's business these days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yes - they. They have both the PARC and (through a joint venture with Fuji) called Fuji Xerox, a fraction of FXPAL.

      But ... well, FXPal seems to keep mucking around looking for problems for the solutions they invent. I suspect their success rate with that is kinda low. And I suspect similar with PARC these days.

    2. Re:Anyone know Xerox's business these days? by 2ms · · Score: 1

      Cool, nice to see they are still involved in so much research. Hope it has been profitable for them.

  6. Re:Yep by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure how many of the originals are still working, but I imagine some of their resumes just had one line.

    Skunk Works Lockheed Martin

  7. So Mrs. Burns destroyed the company after all by guruevi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... Excellent ... seriously though, the writing was on the wall when they hired that woman and started shedding the R&D while refusing to lower prices on their wax based printers because "we are the only ones on the market and people will pay for our patents".

    I know some people working at Xerox, the company became all about following process (6-sigma) and profit and anything innovative that didn't make a profit right away was spun off and then those spinoffs got VC funding and made incredible profits.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    1. Re:So Mrs. Burns destroyed the company after all by macwhiz · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:So Mrs. Burns destroyed the company after all by jerpyro · · Score: 1

      I seem to remember that Kodak, who as I understand it had the first digital camera and buried it, did the same thing with their R&D and that was *in* Rochester. this isn't a new pattern.

      Also ironic: Local shops in Rochester in the '80s wouldn't even stock Fujifilm because it was Kodak's big competitor.

    3. Re:So Mrs. Burns destroyed the company after all by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      I seem to remember that Kodak, who as I understand it had the first digital camera and buried it, did the same thing with their R&D and that was *in* Rochester. this isn't a new pattern.

      New York was the technology hub before Silicon Valley. It was the technology innovation hub led at the time, no doubt, by an "Edison" who claims to have invented something called a "light bulb".

      Technology moved west with the whole Silicon Valley thing - i.e., once the transistor and IC were developed.

      The old big tech firms were once (or still are) head quartered in New York. (And if you really wanted, everyone wore shirts and ties, none of this laid back t-shirt and jeans of today)

  8. Re:You = fake name massive human fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Why do I get the feeling that APK and Trump are the same person...

  9. New name? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

    So, what do we call them now? Fujirox or Xerofilm?

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  10. Is this what it means... by hyades1 · · Score: 1

    ...when Trump talks about how he's going to "make America great again"?

    Asking for a friend.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  11. 00:00:00 by rapiddescent · · Score: 1

    00:00:00:00:00:00