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.

Comments

MoAD

[0100010001010011]

Thanks for all the R&D over the years.

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

Re:MoAD

[Bruce Perens]

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.

Re:MoAD

[Tablizer]

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

Re:MoAD

[jonwil]

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.

Re:MoAD

[neoRUR]

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.

Re:MoAD

[UnixUnix]

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.

does it replace verb?

[kiviQr]

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

Re:does it replace verb?

[zlives]

the correct term going forward is FuX those docs

Re:The End of another chapter

[Nutria]

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.

Re:The End of another chapter

[Bruce Perens]

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.

So Mrs. Burns destroyed the company after all

[guruevi]

... 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.

Re:So Mrs. Burns destroyed the company after all

[macwhiz]

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.