Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
reuters.comI used to work at Xerox as a software developer, about 15 or so years ago, as a fresh young graduate. It was interesting, but also at the same time kind of weird.
You noticed that there were lots of young graduates, but also lots of old staff. With very few people in-between that age range. You'd then realise they'd get graduates and utilised them until they left. While the older staff generally got to a certain salary band, were satisfied and then stuck around until their generous pension could mature.
It was like working in a Dilbert strip with a huge amount of bureaucracy and process, with cargo culting thrown in. All the processes were internal to Xerox too and had acronyms prefixed with X as it was stuff like "Xerox Process Improvement Process".
At the other end of the scale the amount of research I heard about was amazing. They had numerous patients on e-ink displays way before ebooks like the Kindle came to market. But they never seemed to actually make something marketable apart from printers.
I remember being told about a room they had in the R&D labs (again 15 years ago) and it was all white boards. On the ceiling of the room was a camera that scanned all the whiteboards. You could write on the white boards a p in a square [P] and it would send the contents of that wall to the printer, or an e in a square then an e-mail address and it would then send it off as an e-mail instead.
This is pretty accurate. I mean, I’m sure you remember the xww intranet prefix. Such odd quirks there
Oh, yeah. I forgot about all the xww prefix for the intranet.
I remember having a debate with another developer. He thought that an IP address started with 13 (13.X.X.X) was a generic internal IP address like 192.168.X.X.
At the time Xerox owned the whole 13. Address block.
Olivetti had a nice research center too, they had badges that would cause your screen to follow you to whatever computer you were in front of in the building.
Are there any details on how this worked? Sounds awesome.
Here you go. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/ab.html
As a tech journalist, I visited a chap called Andy Hopper up there in the late 80s and it was as cool as it sounded.
They also had it hooked up to their Unix box's finger command.
You could Telnet in and type Finger $username and it would return something like "Bob Smith was last seen 20 minutes ago at the ground floor lift"
i think you’re referring to “Zombieboard” (eric saund published some papers on it in the 90s). it was installed in most meeting rooms, not just a demo room.
Generally the ones who play up their patents are the ones doing the least interesting research.
I think the real lesson here is that once a company identifies it's cash cow it becomes hostile to all other efforts.
Interesting and accurate argument. Is that your own idea or is it based on anything more? I agree with you.
Just look at Apple with the iPhone. Their official online store [0] does not even show Apple displays for notebooks anymore.
[0] https://www.apple.com/shop/mac/mac-accessories/displays-moun...
Apple actually discontinued their Thunderbolt Display in 2016. The LG 4K display is their recommended display.
Yes, I made that example because I think that if a bigger share of their revenue came from notebooks, they would still make their own displays.
Based on a few obversations. I do remember Larry Page's "More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows" doctrine a while back as well as they began killing off popular but unprofitable services.
At the risk of being naive - Xerox hasn't been doing much with their IP and branding so they were to my mind on the way to being the next Novell - a former tech powerhouse bought out and reduced to irrelevance. This merger gives them a chance at continuing relevance by expanding their worldwide presence and perhaps finally trying to leverage the Xerox IP and branding to do more than cheap printers.
I'm glad that Fujifilm bought them rather than a completely unrelated business like, say, a patent troll or Oracle.
They have a relationship that spans decades, with a very successful joint venture in FujiZerox, so they seem like a natural acquirer.
It's interesting how big companies like Xerox and Bell invested a lot into the future (PARC, Bell Labs) and even created new inventions that we use every day. How do such forward-thinking companies grow irrelevant?
These history changing works come from very small groups of people within the company, who usually only stick around when the environment enables their work to thrive. Oftentimes, a single fantastic key manager who protected all the engineers/designers/researchers from infighting/politics/etc. leaving is enough to completely obliterate that team, and kill any chances the company had at replicating the successes the group built up.
Alan Kay said it best:
"I don’t run CDG, I visit it. [Xerox PARC founder Robert] Taylor didn’t want to hire anyone who needed to be managed. That’s not the way it works. I have people on my list who are already moving in great directions, according to their own inner visions. I didn’t have to explain to these people what they would be working on, because they already are."
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xer...
So there really are two prerequisite things to great innovation:
- populating your group with people who are at the very top of their game
- finding someone with the right balance of hard/soft skills needed to both be respected by these brilliant researchers, and to act as an interface between them and the rest of the company politics/bureaucracy/etc (for a startup, that'd be investors/boardmembers/etc.) and make sure they stay on track.
Each of these things is crazy hard, and accomplishing both is exponentially so. Which is why these brilliant teams only appear every once in a while, and even then are still likely to fail.
Because there's a difference in creating/inventing something and successfully bringing it to market. It's a different skill set and mindset. Apple needed Woz to create and Jobs to market.sell.
Steve Jobs' biography is also a good starting point. He describes how Xerox had a lot of interesting patens and ideas around graphical user interfaces (before they were cool), but they didn't manage to make it a nice user experience. The idea was there, the execution not. Which is often a problem with researchers and their poor software engineering skills. They create amazing things that don't work.
I was thinking about this after I posted my comment. I think it's not that they, as you say, "create amazing things that don't work"; it's that what they create "works" good enough for them. They solve a problem and it works for them; but, they don't think about how others will use it and whether it works for them. In the recent LibreOffice thread, the Microsoft ribbon menu is mentioned -- I thought the old menu was fine; but, their user testing found people liked the ribbon.
I'm going to make the controversial claim that such research centres could only be so groundbreaking because they were, by conventional standards, extremely badly managed. Only by getting the right group of people together and letting them play with whatever they want, with a loose budget, do you get results like that. This lassitude is of course completely incompatible with hitting quarterly targets, or the painstaking work of taking a prototype to a product.
Neither was really subject to any kind of market pressure too.
Interestingly this pattern doesn't work with pure research: the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton hosted Einstein, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, but there is little important work done in there.
Carl Icahn is Xero's biggest shareholder with nearly 10%. Can't really imagine him putting up with such nonsense.
Not so controversial as you might think.
"The computer will never be as important to society as the copier," -Xerox executive, quoted from The Innovators.
There's a lot of truth to that. Think of just how much paperwork healthcare, government, banking, etc. all generate.
Things that computers are gradually making irrelevant, no? Can a copy machine eventually supplant computers? Of course not. Copy machines don't have a fraction of the functionality of a computer obviously.
My point is that computers are most certainly not making paper irrelevant. If anything, there's more paper now than ever.
They start chasing the Quarterly Earnings Report. It takes a strong leader to not get caught up in the rat race to beat last quarter and actually invest in projects long term.
I used to work at the Wilsonville, Oregon campus testing printers. At the time, years and years ago, it was the best paying job for a teen. Something like 15/hr. Anyways, the engineers there are really smart. The problem is that the printers just weren't nearly as robust or as good as the HP ones. And except for some paper heavy industries like the Law I think they're suffering from the same fate as the postal service when e-mail took off.
Maybe the horrendous bug in the Xerox copiers that replaces letters and numbers with perfect looking different ones gave that brand the rest.
That was very bad, yep. Also the trouble they've run into in Asia Pacific which caused huge losses - they were counting revenue before it was earned and also signing government/school clients up on long term high cost leases. They're now banned from NZ government contracts https://www.crn.com.au/news/false-accounting-and-fictitious-...
NZ was the Fuji Xerox partnership. Fuji ran that from all accounts. I worked in the Developing Markets Org at Xerox (proper), Asia Pacific was its own silo and they did their own thing. It’s one of the areas I didn’t work with, others were Western Europe, Russia, and Canada. Pretty much everything else, I knew all the marketing people for the countries.
As long as they keep making film (instant and regular) I'm happy. :-)
Fujifilm film is often good (400H, Provia 100f), but the company only seems to care about Instax.
I'd be happy if they'd sell Velvia 50 for large format outside Japan.
And the X100!
I hear good things about them, but between my Canon APS-C DSLR and 8-10 analog cameras, I have more stuff than I can shake a stick at. Should probably sell of a few.
It's disappointing that the company with the Xerox PARC legacy, that spawned many of the innovations people take for granted in modern computers, couldn't figure out a way to carry on. One day I'd love to read a rise-and-fall story about that place.
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age - Hiltzik
Thanks for the recommendation!
Agreed, that is a great book!
>Perhaps that means we’ll be seeing an AI-powered Xerox instant camera in the future…
I know this is just the writer and not Fuji Xerox, but how would that even work? Instant cameras use an analog medium, so it seems like anything you could do with AI would be limited.
Maybe the camera would do an advanced version of that peace-sign detection that some Japanese phones do where you can program it to snap the photo when exposure, etc. is good and everyone is smiling, eyes open, and looking at the sensor?
Yeah...that's a reach, you're right.
Fuji do make a digital instax instant camera. The camera itself is digital. You take the photo and then when you're ready you print it out to instant film. They also do smart phone printers.
Are they innovating less in terms of enterprise printing? We had a fleet of corporate Xerox printers a few years back and they were touting the more expensive solid ink.
There has been a lot of consolidation in the printer industry, go back a couple of decades and there were probably a hundred manufacturers of printers or more.
Url changed from https://petapixel.com/2018/01/31/fujifilm-takes-xerox-6-1b-d..., which points to this.
I was a bit confused at first as Fuji Xerox is already the name of the joint venture between the 2 companies.