Xerox - The Company That Threw Away Everything
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- Опубліковано 30 лип 2024
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You’re probably familiar with Xerox as the photocopying company. They were so influential to the industry that Xerox has become a synonym for photocopies. While this is what Xerox is most known for, Xerox’s contributions are far larger. They’ve played massive roles in the invention and development of graphical user interfaces, laser printers, computer-generated bitmap images, modern text editors, object-oriented programming, computers, laptops, and even the internet. Yet, Xerox is about to be wiped off the face of the planet. Their revenues have been consistently declining for the past 2 decades and they just became unprofitable as well. Even if Xerox is able to regain profitability in the short term, it seems like bankruptcy is inevitable for the company. This video explains how Xerox went from being a market leader and innovator to being on the doorstep of bankruptcy.
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Timestamps:
0:00 - What Happened To Xerox
2:39 - The Rise Of Xerox
5:42 - Printing Money
8:50 - The Brutal Fall
11:47 - The Fate Of Xerox
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One of my favorite quotes for continuous improvement and innovation, “The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stone.”
Who said this pls?
@@divinefavouregeh I do not know, but I will remember it forever.
@@divinefavouregehI made it up
@@Roccofan Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani said this as an analogy to oil supply
@@FargothsSecretHidingPlace That sounds right.
I worked for a small company that went all-in on Xerox's electronic publishing systems. It was an amazing system that allowed you to create documents that were hundreds of pages long and then print out custom amounts on their high speed printers.
We worked with their Xerox's EPS (Electronic Publishing System) unit out of El Segundo and were pushing the capabilities of what those systems could do. So the folks in Xerox corporate got wind of what we were doing and came to our little office. When we told them what kind of market they could cultivate with automated page layout, design, and printing, their eyes kind of glazed over and they made weak excuses on why they couldn't innovate at a faster pace. I was practically begging them to allow fonts larger than 24 points and they couldn't imagine why anyone would want that.
Basically the PARC and El Segundo offices were doing incredible things while the guys running the company proper were complete boneheads.
I feel like someone from the future came and made all the dumb decisions at xerox, cuz with all the stuff xerox invented it sounds like the future would’ve been cyberpunk 2077 levels of dystopian society if xerox was competent.
A spot-on summary. Well done.
Just goes to show how damaging out of touch execs can be for a company. They could’ve done so much more!
Nothing says fun like spilling the 4045 discard toner container :)
@@christopherr4046 - that's on the same level as operating a Roneo machine😂😂😂
Man, I get this weird feeling in my chest hearing this story. The "they had no idea what they had" is so insane. Inventing something revolutionary while having a closed scope of its unimaginable potential.
For real, they actually blew it
they didn't create anything, some of thier employees did ,and the company took the idea from their inventors and burried it. They were savvy buisinessmen. And that's it. When u give a cow blueprint for a new plane ,it will just chew it. If u sell it to a literate,he may sell it for profit. Only an engineer could turn into reality.
It’s easy to say that when looking at it in hindsight, but if you were the management and “grew up” only knowing steady profits and massive market share, would you be in a rush to risk your big salary and bonuses? For what? Some fly by night thing called the “internet”? Who would even waste their time with such a thing?
@@Roccofan I know where they were coming from. That's why it sucks so much.
I mean, there’s companies right now that you’ll look back at and WISH you invested in today. People will be saying the same exact thing. There’s just no way of knowing what the future holds, especially back then when everything was brand new.
Fun fact: Here in India, people use the word "xerox" to mean photocopy. Here, they never say "This is photocopy of that document". They say "This is a xerox of that document."
It's only during my teenage that I learnt that Xerox is actually a company name.
Same here in Philippines
Same in Jamaica 🇯🇲
exactly same verb in Russian
Dang that's interesting
Same for godrage and Maggie too
I worked for Xerox for 10 years as a tech. The management was always the problem. At that time our CEO was Ursula M. Burns. They had to pay her to quit that’s how bad.
I agree -as I worked for xerox as well ..
Excellent
I started work for Xerox in the early 1970s. The quality of the management went downhill the whole time I was there.
Management is almost always to blame.. and im to the point i wont invest in any company that makes a female the ceo or face of the company. Rare i would even vote for one
xerox was so bad homie got stuck with mr burns
This reminds me of AT&T Bell Labs. They invented the transistor, solar panel, UNIX and C programming language, and so much more. As a regulated US monopoly they gave this stuff away instead of patenting it because keeping it to themselves would threaten their monopoly on the telephone. Maybe stupid for business but great for the world.
I'm confused. Selling UNIX would have found them in court that's why UNIX wasn't patented.
Infos for that argument. ....?
@@ea_naseer uh unix was sold for years until they decided to release enough code from research unix to create bsd
Yeah, I remember the story told by a Science teacher that AT&T Bell labs showcased the Transistor tech at a tech show and besides military interests, there was a strange Japanese man by the name of "Masaru Ibuka" that wanted the licencing rights for making Transistors. That is how we got the first transistor radio made by the company "Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo" but, most people will recognise it's current name of "Sony".
Bell Labs is different. They were prohibited from making money due to an anti-trust agreement.
I worked for Xerox in the late 1980’s through early 1990’s. The slogan Xerox used was “Xerox, the document company”. They could not and would not see past the whole “document” mentality. If it was not about reproducing that document they weren’t interested in it. As you pointed out, we had large 22inch screens on our in-house terminals, Ethernet, optical mice, e-mail, voicemail, terminals produced for us by Sun. Their belief that the hard copy document was the be all and end all will be there down fall if they do indeed fall. We had some very good years while I was there.
It’s insane to me that they couldn’t see the paperless future just ahead. Everyone was always talking about it! And they were soaking in it apparently
@@trashyraccoon2615 especially as they seem to have been going in the paperless direction themselves internally, as Mark pointed out. It's madness.
It was Paul Allaire's special abilities that brought Xerox to the front, though the Tail winds of that era also played its part. It was very interesting to see Paul coming back to resurrect a shaky xerox in the 90s. The ex IBM chap couldn't fit in to the xerox shoes well at the cruising times. Then came the merger of Rank, cutting the British talent to the minimum which lead to an autocratic top end frittering away the leads and shutting their eyes to the branching out to equally vital and achievable arenas. Anyway it was a pleasure to take on the regular toughest targets. Another joy was in beating the Japanese rivals in every corner, though Fuji as a companion brought some excellent war horses to the stable. Another take from Xerox is that if one had a stint of 10 odd years with that old xerox, he should be a winner, be anywhere in the world. Xerox shall be a case study for some more years to come.
they even invented a subscription model for a hardware device before the IoT revolution. Truly innovative.
Feels like maybe it's a good thing they didn't get so big with their attitude. Subscription model on hardware and maybe even software might become a thing way earlier than now.
Xerox is a company that have brilliant engineers but lead by bonehead profit-focused management. So much wasted potential that it slowly kills them.
IBM had that for many many decades as well. In fact, you rarely actually ever owned their industrial hardware .
Not to mention Xerox was still developing erasable, re-printable paper in 2008. CEO Anne Mulcahy made sure it would never see the light of day.
Either you become like Xerox and you give away things that help society Or you become like Disney and you still own copyrights to movies made by people who are now long dead.
Choose hahaha
Funny thing copyrights expire at 75 years I think. Disney is using legal trickery to hold onto them. Snow White is not even an original disney creation, but the masses think otherwise.
You can blame Disney for extending the copyright years fro m52 now up to 75 and they are lobbying right now to extend it to 100 because they can't have Mickey go into public domain.
Same as die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Perhaps. But the truth is Xerox did not develop these technologies in a bubble. Arguably the first 'demo' of the mouse happened back in 1968 with Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute. Other technologies like TCP and IP , serial communications, and network switching were already established. What Xerox *did* do was make all of this WORK. They were used to producing high priced machinery - which was profitable to them. What they didn't see coming was the power of the microprocessor and how quickly it would scale in speed and capability. Apple was scrappy (and after the Lisa), made a machine using many of those technologies that most businesses could afford.
That said, I do believe the ENGINEERS at PARC understood the power and potential of their tech - they are not to be blamed. You have to remember the times to put this in perspective. Computer technology was in its infancy. The execs at Xerox could see no way to monetize the technology they had developed - which cost them a fortune. Like Atari, only a few years later, they had a cash cow and they knew how to work that profit. Both companies had a lack of vision at the helm - and why not? They were making money hand over fist!
It's easy to look back at these kinds of mistakes now and have a laugh about them, but while the tech has changed, humanity has not. We all still have our blind spots, our faults, and although we may not make those same mistakes again (because we have knowledge of the pitfalls), there will ever be more and more challenges in the future where people will say the same thing about us. As Mark Twain once wrote: History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. This has happened before, and although the circumstances might change, it will essentially all happen again.
Similar analog occurred in Italy; Olivetti is an Italian technological manufacturer that is credited as having created the first personal computer in 1965. Through an unfortunate series of events involving the founders and engineers, and subsequent mismanagement, the company is essentially relegated to producing niche retail sales terminals, copiers, and printers.
My family's first IBM compatible computer was an Olivetti M24, or as it was known here in the US, AT&T PC 6300.
Yeah I remember Olivetti
My high school in Alberta used Olivetti computers in the '80s. That was the last I saw of them (except a reference in the Simpsons).
Sure they made typewriters as well
Olivetti eventually private labeled an IBM PC clone for both Xerox and ATT; it was built around an 8086 16 bit CPU rather than the 8 bit 8088, so it ran faster than the IBM PC of that time period.
As a former employee of Xerox, I shake my head. It's important to keep focused, but... the mouse? PDFs? these literally changed the world as we know it. All I can say is, the future belongs to visionaries, and that is never what Xerox was.
Adobe was in fact born out of Xerox Parc, but the PDF and maybe PostScript is the only respectful thing they have on their name
it seems like Joseph Wilson was the Steve Jobs of his time. He convinced Physicist Carlson to pursue his invention and make it a commercial product, and then founded PARC before he died. Unfortunately the wise king did not leave wise heirs.
No. Xerox had visionaries hence them inventing things. Unfortunately those visionaries were the foot soldiers that didn’t make the decisions.
@@kreuner11 and not even that, because neither really came from Xerox.
Perhaps the staff at PARC were the visionaries and the Rochester leadership did not "get it." Popular management slogans included "stick to the knitting" which meant to stay on the straight and narrow of core strength. There is a story that one of the most prolific inventors of xerographic nuance was a major stockholder or manager, and he turned thumbs down on all things from the "dreamers" at PARC. He was the big fish. PARC was the new big pond. When ordinary workers had to give up their Xerox Star, and learn Microsoft on a PC, it was a step backward in their work. So, someone really pulled the plug before the cost could be wrung out of the product. And today, "activist stockholders" are the real culprit in taking cash out of the company by stock buy-backs and putting the firm into a debt-based position. So if Jobs and Gates took advantage of that open door, they were aided and abetted by that inventor pushing things aside as if valueless.
Xerox even had a call center, I worked there, it was insane, people would log in and leave and come back to log out 8 hours later, without taking any calls, laptops would just get stolen mainly by managers, people would just get randomly fired and rehired 3 months later, they even killed a guy inside the call center, he was hiding at the call center because one of the cartels was looking for him, he didn't even work there, but was friends with one of the managers, so he was sleeping in the offices, eating at the cafeteria and bathing in the bathrooms (bathrooms had showers for some reason), and one day a cartel cell with 8-10 guys with AK's and bulletproof vests gets inside the building and starts looking for him all over the building until they find him and kill him like a dog in front of everyone, that place was insane.
omg that's wild!
Cool
@@vxllvxn why tf do you talk like an npc
😳
Is this real?
The same thing happened to Nokia, they developed iPhone like phone 3 years before Apple, but their mgmt rejected it as they were sure people would continue buying their brick phones
Actually, they thought it is costly and most people cannot buy them. We don't know what happened in their brains, but they are working to make it cheaper. So they never throwed the idea away, it's just that they are not able to make it cheaper while Apple brought it for a reasonable price. It's still costly, but manageable.
I think Nokia was trying, actually they always do experiment. They just somehow didn't nailed the UX that Apple did with iPhone. Apple main strength is making devices that are really easy to use, enjoyable and looks good, all put together. But Apple isn't always that advance.
Nokia was far adventurous, fun, but is less focused. They had touchscreen smartphones, but they just didn't nailed it and wasn't polished enough for success. They lack continuity and focused. I guess because they also try make their device more affordable on most of their products, only few that are really expensive.
Convergence, an acquaintance worked on it in the early 2000s
@@kornkernel2232 Naw, Nokia, Samsung, and LG all had touchscreen UX products on the market before the iPhone. LG even put out a touchscreen-only phone a few months before the iPhone. The new innovations Apple brought to the market with the iPhone were:
(1) Ditching the physical keyboard and relying entirely upon a virtual touchscreen keyboard. All previous implementations either used a physical keyboard, or a simplified UI (e.g. touch only for a number pad). Everyone was scared to try using a touchscreen for keyboard input.
(2) An integrated store for buying, distributing, and installing apps. Basically iTunes for phone apps. This was also what made the iPod so successful. If you owned early smartphones or PDAs, you remember how horrible it was trying to get apps/songs onto it. You needed to download it onto your PC first, connect your PC to the device, then transfer the individual files over. The process was non-intuitive, confusing, different for each manufacturer, and an overall PITA. The iPhone let you buy apps, and they'd be downloaded and installed on your phone automatically.
I'm reading this comment on a Nokia.
Nokia's comeback is a great story.
I have seen several companies do this. Think they are never going to fail, and everyone will always need their product. Something new comes along and 'poof' they're gone.
The worst part is that Xerox actually had several outs but they didn’t use any of them
Straight A$$holes 🤣
The best part is that they kinda created a decent fraction of the something new.
I think Kodak did the same thing. They had developed digital cameras and then decided to focus on film.
@@garethbaus5471 yea it's kind of maddening for some reason 😂 so much wasted potential
IBM's story was similar in many ways. They were the tech leader, the tech innovator, the tech giant. They were on top and had unstoppable momentum. But over time, their engineers eroded while their managerials multiplied. They stopped inventing and started investing. Today, they're basically just a retired company living off patent pools, stocks, and branding. They don't make tech anymore, they make money.
I dispute that to some extent. IBM went into really large systems computing and left the PC world almost entirely. Look into the companies that have IBM software and computers from financial institutions to scientific systems.
And RACF (security system) has never been breached.
@@mrcryptozoic817 But leaving the PC world entirely meant that IBM would never dominate the computer industry like it once did. In the 1960s, 70% of all the computers in America were made by IBM. The Federal Government was pursuing antitrust action against IBM for its alleged monopoly status. Seems quaint by now.
True but consumer products were never the BIG money makers. IBM knows this and chooses to focus on the BIG fish.
@@EnsignRedSquad
Have u seen IBM stock and/or revenue over the past 10 or 20 years? Are they catching big fishes?
@@rempitizm And if you actually read their report you would've knownIBM's pc sector while generated revenue, was actually making a loss over at least 100mil each year since 2001 until it was sold to lenovo. At that point it was clear they can not compete against the likes of Dell, who just ensembles the parts and having a lower price. So either they need to sell off all the production line, lay off all the staffs, or just sell it to a third party, lenovo made a lucrative offer and it made sense to sell. It worked well for both parties, lenovo with its cheaper workforce and material costs is now a force to be reckon with, while IBM got cash and can focus on profitable side of business. IBM is innovators, but not great implementers.
I worked for Xerox from 1983 to 1993. Saw this one coming a mile away. I still have old coworker friends that still work there and we've discussed the slow decline of the company. On a side note, most of the managers I've worked for passed away shortly after they retired! The corporate culture sucks the life right out of you. Pity! it was once a great company to work for but no more.
Have you heard of “The Mother of all demos”? It was in 1968. It introduced GUI, Arpanet, video conferencing, realtime collaboration, and many other concepts. Employees of Xerox were there and started PARC. It is amazing.
Any computer techs here might be interested in how Alan Kay (at Xerox PARC) ever invented object-oriented programming and the Smalltalk GUI in the first place. It was largely an accident. When Alan Kay was in college, he was interested in computer graphics but didn't have any idea how to go about it. He was earning money for his tuition by a work-study job as a computer operator at the university computer center. One day, one of their users complained that their Simula 67 compiler was buggy. Alan Kay knew nothing of Simula either but he promised to look into it. When he learned the Simula language, he realized that the concepts of classes and coroutines would enable classes of graphic objects to be designed. Eureka!
Glad I caught this comment!
Oop- object oriented programming was already known in academia in the 60s or maybe even 50s. Smalltalk just incorporated the concepts.
@@collinsa8909 The concepts of classes and inheritance were first introduced to the programming world in early programming languages like Simula 67. Of course, mathematicians had been studying algebraic structures since the 19th century.
@@sinz52 LISP says hi.
@@brodriguez11000 If you're referring to the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), that came later, when Lisp developers heard about Smalltalk.
In Romania we use " to xerox" the same way we use "to Google" and I'm pretty sure our word for refrigerator "frigider" is from the company who was amongst the first producer of refrigerators " Frigidaire".
I googled all over myself
@@jahjoekaeww
FYI, it actually means “frigid air”. In case you never caught it! Lol. I didn’t till I was older
@@trashyraccoon2615 I actually didn't,thx for telling me:)
My family had a Kelvinator
Fun Fact - The Xerox 914 used actual rabbit fur as a key component due to it's static electric properties.
Horrible
only the early samples did
You never need fur for its static properties and behaviors !
@@19683 Cope.
"cope"🤓
@@md_vandenberg Please cope when karma bites you
Previous title: When A Company Doesn’t Protect Their Intellectual Property..
Actually, the company didn’t care about these IPs, they honestly wanted to stay a photocopy and printer company. Xerox PARC willingly shared their discovers because the CEO didn’t care, and I wouldn’t be surprised if all the engineers went to go to go at Microsoft and Apple afterwards. The later wasn’t mentioned in the Steve Jobs biography.
If they had patented those ideas, we would probably be living in a much less advanced society today.
@@jasonlittle6542 No, they would just be the Qualcomm and GE of internet technologies.
Damm dey ded
With a different thumbnail
This happens as most companies where there is a single product driving their profits, so that powerful interests within the company representing these products quash any attempt to find any new markets for new products. It's not just about "they don't know what they have," many do, but internal politics prevents the exploitation of innovation. See IBM, Kodak, Motorola, etc. There's risk in pivoting to a new product that may cannibalize the sales of an old one.
Friends at PARC showed me the ALTO in 1978. My first thought was I could make something like that around one of the upcoming 16/32 bit microprocessors. I was handed one of the first silicon samples for the Motorola 68000 by Tom Gunter, which I took back to our lab at Olivetti's Cupertino R&D center and plugged it into a wire wrap prototype board that drove a bitmapped CRT similar to the ALTO, and it worked. We developed that further into a working PCB and with keyboard and a cross-compiler for programming, and demonstrated it to Olivetti management. But they were afraid of what IBM would do, and hesitated too long into taking it into production. We left in disgust to start a different company. A year later Apple introduced the Macintosh with almost identical internal circuitry to my prototype, but a tiny 9" CRT. Enzo Torresi, the lab director, after seeing the reveal of the Macintosh, called me and said "Now I understand what you were trying to do". A few years later, Olivetti went from one of the largest manufacturers of IP equipment in Europe, into bankruptcy. In tech, you have to move forward, or die. "Paper and toner" as a business plan won't last forever.
There was a strange reversed NDA policy : Xerox employees could show and tell the details of their work, but it was forbidden to adopt someone else's idea, everything needed to be designed inside PARC. (Michael Hiltzik : Dealers of Lightning)
... PS: Engelbart's "mouse" is a notable exception.
Your story is incredible. I guess you didn't keep the prototype? Olivetti is indeed another good example of a company with incredible engineers and potential, but short sighted management.
@@raoulduke6043 Oddly enough, Enzo eventually became a fairly wealthy local success, by hooking up with Gene Ahmdahl's son and starting Businessland, then rolling that over into several other startups, eventually becoming a well known VC figure in the valley. Mario Mazzola did well as a VP at Cisco. Giancarlo Bisone became a VP at Compaq. Enrico Pesatore ended up a VP at DEC. All bailed from Olivetti while they could. But the high-quality typewriter and calculator business that Olivetti did so well in didn't survive the transition to ubiquitous low-cost micro computing and Italian labor problems, and went tits up. Sort of like the paper and toner business model at Xerox currently circling the drain.
I remember seeing a TV commercial advertising the Xerox Alto back in 1972. It seemed rather odd to me that they were advertising it, but had no plans regarding selling it. Even as a 12-year-old back then, I *knew* this was the future. But Xerox squandered it. Fortunately, Apple Computer saw the potential in this as the result of Steve Jobs and his team visiting PARC in 1979 and having a closer look at the Alto, Microsoft followed suit and the rest is history!
I worked for Xerox from 1978 to 1989 and again from 1992 to 2011. From 1982 to 1989 I worked in the engineering community in El Segundo and with folk from PARC. We disdainfully referred to the company management as "toner heads" because of their focus on copiers.
My time in the engineering community was a wonderful time of innovation. I worked in tech support for all the amazing prototype machines and network. No repair manuals, just shared knowledge among the techs and engineers.
I was hired into the engineering community for my experience with one of the copiers when it was used as one of the prototype laser printers. I was soon put on network support and spent my hours keeping the washing machine sized 300 MB disk drives up and running, trouble shooting network failures and computer's connections to the net. We worked with a prototype fiber optic Ethernet.
Best job I've ever had other than the grueling daily commute through the Los Angeles South Bay area.
Several years ago, we deployed multiple imageRUNNER Advance units from Canon at the Utah Avenue Campus. Interestingly enough, we had recently hired a veteran from Xerox. He almost cried when he entered the newly renovated office space which then belonged to a logistics company. He had some interesting stories about the place. There's quite a history behind this place, if you will.
I strongly recommend the book Dealers of Lightning, which was written about Xerox PARC. Fascinating read.
This is typically what happens when "tech" companies aren't managed by engineers.
Engineers and R&D initially cost a lot of money, in order to create new products. When these products sell successfully on the market, it's the sales department that's praised for their skills and not the engineering department for creating something great.
This results in management saving on R&D, while investing in their sales-department. This goes well and increases profit and revenue initially, until their products become dated and deprecated a couple years later. At this point it becomes obvious that the sales department was just benefiting from the engineers work, yet often to late to save the company.
A tech company managed entirely by engineers will also have its share of problems. Just look at Twitter under Musk's guidance. You just cannot fix some business and fundamental problems even with the best tech. I believe Apple is so successful because it was lead by someone, who understood all the necessary parts - neither of them to the tiniest detail. But still Steve Jobs was a crazy guy, but he knew about tech and about business and sales and advertisement. And most of all, he didn't get blindsided by success of one product just like Xerox.
I know many briliant tech people who are capable of incredible things with the smallest amounts of resources. But even though they get great ideas, I would never put a whole company in their hands, because that's just not who they are.
@@TheIrisCZ Some corrections for your comment:
A) Musk studied Arts and Physics, and thus is not an engineer! He's an overrated car-salesman and scam-artists overall.
B) Steve Jobs was a brilliant salesperson and visionary, yet had the technical knowhow equivalent with that of my granny. Steve Wozniak was the engineer behind Apples initial success, yet unknown to most people...
It's true that most engineers don't want the attention most CEO's get, yet once they take this responsibility they most often do it right...
I worked for Fuji Xerox (a joining between Fuji Film and Xerox which have now recently split) for 15 years. We were constantly reminded about how Xerox invented so many things, and at the same time were constantly wondering "What have they done with it since?".
I haven't photocopied anything in 5 years. Maybe more. I also very rarely print anything...Maybe twice a year for contract renewal and that's changed since I have a permanent post. Paperless is more a thing than ever. You can even e-Sign legally for many things nowadays.
As someone that worked in the tech division of Xerox in the 80s and 90s, this video has so many factual inaccuracies.
Don't know why I started feeling bad. I've seen many companies die , but this one unknown to many,( even me ) made me feel bad for it's demise.
Xerox had a lot of very talented people in the company. They were mostly known for their photocopiers and laser printers but, as mentioned in this video, they also were responsible for a lot of technology that we are still using today.
In the early eighties they also marketed an ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning) that was far far ahead of any competition. I had the honor to work with it in the company I worked for at that time. That system was called XBMS (Xerox Business Management System). Their transaction processor supported multiprocessors on IBM systems long before IBM's own transaction processor (CICS) could. I was a systems engineer for that product for about 15 years, and, oh boy, it was a joy to work with it. When the year 2000 was approaching, the system died a silent death. They just didn't want to invest any money anymore to make it Y2K compatible. And, as far as I could assess, it wouldn't even have been a huge problem to adapt the system. It was so well structured that it would have been a piece of cake. All date functions were centralized; the only thing they had to do was to introduce a date cut over (all dates less than 50 (or whatever reasonable) are 21st century and all dates bigger than 50 were 20th century dates).
When I later was a systems engineer for an ERP system on Unix, and later Linux, I used many of the ideas that I discovered in that old XBMS system.
I wonder if anyone watching this video has ever heard of XBMS, or even worked with it.
I didn’t know that. Meanwhile, down the street from PARC there’s SAP today!
So... Kodak and Blockbuster's flaws combined? Kodak refused to go digital because of their film domination. Blockbuster refused Netflix.
Refused netflix? Refused to buy or what?
@@callous21yes, pretty much, Netflix tell Blockbuster if they were interested in buy them and Blockbuster said no because they thought Netflix was going to be a failure, we now know that happened
Yup... I went to a demo at a Xerox facility in Orange County, CA in 1981 and saw a computer graphical interface two or three years before it reappeared on the Apple Macintosh.
I worked with a guy whose first job was with Xerox in the mid 80s. He had a lot of good things to say about the star workstations.
I remember at my workplace in 1976 we had a “Papers Branch” which posessed a big Xerox machine that ran on 415V with the big orange plug. Other branches sent in their copy requests with a cover sheet and we’d come back the next day and pick them up.
Very good video, especially when I know someone who used to work for Xerox and their ETA on fixing the copiers gets higher every passing year.
I bet some hedge funds already short selling this company. Rest in peace legend. Your legacy will always in nerd memories (me included).
Xerox PARC was merely only founded in 1970. Mother of All Demos occurred much earlier on December 9, 1968. Douglas Engelbart and his team invented and publicly demonstrated most of these things 7 years before Xerox is credited to have done so.
That's why Steve Jobs said they are "Printer Heads" and dont know how to sell computers
I am sad, mad and happy that they deserved this, at the same time.. this is a completely new feeling.
😂
hahaha like actually tho
That new feeling you're experiencing is called "smappy".
I invented that word. If you or anyone want to use/say/type that, pay me $8 a month.
@@tresnonugroho6397 No, Elon. You don't get to rename and copyright 'ambivalence' just because you couldn't spell it. 🤣
If they would have put patents on all those things, we probably would not have them easily available today.
Yep, considering how Xerox company operates. So I guess it's a good thing that Apple and Microsoft instead grabbed their ideas and what lead to the industry today. Microsoft and Apple are far more savvy with technological advancements and more visionary in computing. Xerox seems to be always stuck o their same ways, never willing to evolve.
Glad you made a video on Xerox. I was wondering someone make a video on Xerox, many have no clue what they did apart from photocopiers. Vision is very important for any company else you will end up like Xerox.
I worked for Xerox in 1981 while in grad school. Even by then computers were still a marginal afterthought at Xerox, which was sad given how creative they were.
Hey Hari a heads up.
When you look for a company earnings you should always look their SEC filings, Xerox have $900,000,000 in cash, but they have have $5,000,000,000 in retained earnings is not like they are short in money or lines of credit.
Not only that but they also put a $400,000,000 non-cash loss of goodwill in their balance sheet.
So for all purposes they lost $400,000,000 but since this is a non-cash loss they didn´t lost nothing.
This is why their stock had a growth of almost 21% since their latest filing.
$5T in retained earnings?
@@ThinkerHaistTV my mistake. 5B.
I worked for Xerox for nearly 23 years, in my last 11 years as an analyst - I quit in 1995. They always looked at the bottom line for the current month only. Very little future planning. If something wouldn't give a massive return on investment almost immediately, it was pretty much pushed aside.
Sad
pic at 12:49 (some guy watching the sun set) is so impressive while hearing the narration, that it reminds me of visiting the location where parc was situated back in 1990's. i am grateful for xerox's many inventions.
I spent 20 years working in Silicon Valley. Among the companies I worked for were Oracle, IBM and Apple. One of my last positions was at Xerox PARC.
Of all the positions I held, I enjoyed my time at Xerox the most. Many of the people I worked with had been there for 20+ years. They welcomed me there just like I had been there with them all along.
Xerox PARC doesn't try to cover up the fact that they had innovated so many technologies that are used today. They had a museum there on site that showed prototypes of many of their early inventions. I found my time there fascinating and the lack of braggadocio to be very refreshing. There are so many other companies who have flamed up like a supernova and then flamed out five years later. Xerox has been around for 116 years and they persevere to this day. There are COUNTLESS number of tech companies who cannot claim this longevity. I will always cherish the time I spent at Xerox PARC.
So basically Xerox is dying from a thousand paper cuts? That's awfully fitting and rather poetic.
I think that the expiration of their patent portfolio was also a major contributor to their decline.
Probably the worst example of a company completely missing the forest, and only seeing their one favorite tree, in the entire tech industry. Profoundly unimaginative stagnation in upper management, while they had some of the best innovative research inventors and engineers on the planet . . . for that moment.
I worked as an authorized Xerox tech for a while. Never worked on their copiers, but worked on a ton of small laser printers which were complete junk. I worked on a couple solid ink printers though which was pretty cool.
We had Xerox 800 word processors in the late 70s. Their cassette-based systems were very difficult to operate, but their 850 system, with 8" diskettes and CRTs, were competitive with the multitude of companies that were involved in word processing.
Around 1980 we had a demo of the Xerox Documenter, which had the mouse and icons of systems we're using today. None of which have Xerox nameplates.
Kodak was a similar story. They invented the digital camera way back in 1975 but sat on it for fear of losing money from their film-based business model (print and photo development). At their highest point they had sales in excess of 10 billion dollars. They finally filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
After hearing this version of kodak story, i remembered Google. Google not released AI search in the fear of losing there revenue from adds. Meanwhile Microsoft(open ai) released there version and became hit. Sad part is unlike kodak, google made there disruptive innovation open source.
Rolex also poo-poo'ed digital watches when they were presented with it.
I worked for a division of the University Library in 1984-1986. Somebody had printed out a sign that said We can't Xerox anything. Xerox is a noun.
My first printer was a XEROX inkjet back around 1998
After finding out that the replacement cartridges costed more than the original purchase of the printer, i just threw it to the trash ...
And no, this was not a "printhead an ink all in one solution" like from HP and Canon, i had to purchase 4 separate ink tanks (that time without any chips, so literally just plastic and ink inside) for 1.5x of the original purchase, which included the inks as well ...
I was 18 years old that time. Nowadays i check the "consumables" availability first, and decide if i want that product or not.
I am 43 now, and i can confirm that XEROX gave the world many valuable things, but such as most of the rich companies , they got greedy and lazy.
And this is how the world works. If you fail to innovate for a long time, you are out of business ...
The lack of chips probably meant it was easy to get cheap knock off cartridges, the market that HP actively wages war against...
@@rorychivers8769 This was around 1999 and the copy cartridges were not available at the time in Hungary.
When I was a kid when we wanted to copy something, we used a high quality SLR 35mm camera with a flat field macro lens. This was set up in an inverse tripod with proper lighting. When the film roll was complete it was sent out for development and printing on 8 X 10 inch sheets. Expensive to set up and to use. We had no other way to make copies of documents.
Xerox as a consumer printer is great. I bought fuji xerox printer it's still run great and strong without any problem after 2+ years and 3000+ pages. It just ready to use when I needed without any tremendous attention and maintenance.
I can bypass toner and drum counter easily, they didn't fused the drum and toner cartridge, easy to replace consumable part, and cheap aftermarket drum and toner cartridge.
But it's bad for company that depending on razor and blade business.
Never knew. Thank you for making this documentary. A liitle gem imo.
I could write a book about this subject having lived through it. You nailed it with this video.
Really interesting video!
Xerox seems to be following a similar path to *Kodak*. Both companies were hugely dominant in a technology that was eventually overtaken - in Kodak's case, by digital cameras and digital imaging.
Must be something in the water in Rochester NY! Kodak had the first digital camera, but failed to exploit it because it would disrupt their film manufacturing and processing businesses.
Xerox - only want products that would force a customer to pay more every time they used it.
Kodak - only want products that would force a customer to buy more film and film processing services.
I think Kodak is still hanging on but perhaps just barely.
Both were also heavily based in Rochester NY.
I had 2 Uncles who worked for Xerox, this is a damn shame what the company has let happen.
I remember in the late 1970s and early 1980s, school hand-outs were still being replicated using carbon paper and a ditto machine because photocopiers were still too expensive for class room use. Maybe it was different at high schools and colleges, or even elementary and junior high/middle schools in richer school districts, but not where I grew up. I remember the Post Office had a crappy copier that cost 7 cents per page, but the stationary store across the street had a nice one that charged 10 cents.
I had been working in Xerox factory in electronic manufacturing and refurbishing operations in my country on 90s and witnessed all this tragic beginning of the end for the company that time.
In fact it was fantastic to see all new high-tech development going on and at the same time couldn’t understand so why many second hand (but totally new) copier machines been dismantled and scrapped in front of my and another employee eyes.
Several top bosses decisions made wrongly hundreds times definitely sealed the end of story of this amazing company.
Definitely it was the best ever company I had worked.
@ 6:20 10 cents per copy might seem expensive today, but the alternative at the time was a photostat, which was far more expensive and produced a negative of the original, i.e., everything white was reproduced in black, and everything black reproduced in white, so to get a true copy first you had to make the negative photostat and then use the negative to make a positive photostat, which was time-consuming and very expensive as the special paper was required. Yes, that's how old I am. I remember those! ;-) ;-) ;-)
You could say Xerox also started the idea of service model that current printers are trying to do.
Nice history lesson! I remember my uncle working for Xerox back in the late 80's. He worked for a small company they had acquired and Xerox basically squandered all of their inventions and talent as well. Sad story really.
I was a Xerox field service technician from ‘84 to ‘03, David Kearns was CEO when I hired in, he did a phenomenal job innovating the business model to compete with other companies, but that was the only focus. In ‘87 myself and another tech supported the internal testing of a new product line at the engineering center in Webster NY, got to sit in on design team meetings, what a communication vacuum: every subsystem team took their criteria, ran with it, and threw the prototypes together to see if it would work. Again and again.
I once did a short contract with Xerox UK in the early 90's. The kit was brilliant, but the standing joke amongst the engineers was senior management weren't interested because there was no way to add a copy meter to a computer..
They were right at the time though the subscription model is invading all levels of technology today. Interesting.
This is so painful! 😣 It's much harder to maintain success than to attain it
I had a friend that worked in the accounting department at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, also known as PARC, back in the late 1970s.
She told me tales of what seemed like unlimited resources the developers could dabble in at that place. The electronic tools and gadgets they could obtain for their work were extravagant. The tool closets were well stocked and left unlocked.
PARC had Xerox color copiers on the premises, with the color reproduction so good, and the sensing devices in the dollar-change machines in the break rooms being so poor, that employees would run-off dollar bills in the color copiers, trim the paper down to dollar size, and pass them off in the coin change-machines.
Since my friend worked in accounting and handled the petty cash, she would get weekly visits from the vending machine company route service guy, with about 20 copies of bogus dollar bills retrieved from the change machines, and exchange those bogus bills for legal tender.
Management at PARC had no issues about that petty larceny going-on, it was all about running a research facility and keeping the employees happy.
This show makes me appreciate the computer and its technology even more than before. Logically Answered, thank you for posting this show on UA-cam.
As I am watching this video and the early history of Xerox, i am truly amazed at how innovative the people who built this company were. Amazing! I swear, America is truly a hot-bed of technological innovation and their free-market economy enables even more innovation. That being said, it's sad how complacent the later leadership became😑😑
Nice video! I never knew what Xerox was until now.
Even their industrial copiers/printers were amazing. I used to be a laser printer operator in the 90's and those things pumped out 10000 pages per hour (5000 duplex). 6 input trays of 2000 sheets, 4 output bins of 3000 - mixed stocks - highly programmable. And touchscreen controls - on machines that came out originally in the late 80's.
They should have spun off a new company 💻 They had an all-star team at PARC. Alan Kay should have known better
The $16K base price of the Xerox Star is 10 times the base price of the IBM PC, but they were not comparable at all. The base PC had 16KB of memory and no disks at all. Upgrading a PC to be roughly equivalent to a Star would cost way over $10K and would need products not available until years later.
On the other hand the Star was sold as part of a larger system and not as a stand alone machine, so people who bought them paid many times the base price.
This. The base memory on the Xerox 8010 was 128KB, though it ran much better with 256 or 384. (It could hold up to 768kb, as I recall.) Base storage was 10MB at a time when the base PC was sold with a a floppy. And the display was a 1024x808 black and white bit-mapped display - far beyond the capabilities of the base IBM graphics.
But the basic point still remains. The Mac, which debuted in 84 after the Star's debut in 81 was priced at $2500, but an individual person or manager could decide to buy one. Buying a Star was committing to spending not just the $16k mentioned above, but a print server and printer, a mail server, a server to run Clearinghouse (a directory server), etc. All this would add up to tens of thousands of dollars, meaning an individual manager could never commit to this kind of spending.
I worked for Digital Equip back when we were introduced to the DIX standard. that was Digital , Intel and Xerox.
The idea came from Xerox and the presentation I saw was a Xerox presentation. It showed everything connected by networking from businesses to household items like refrigerators. Way ahead of their time.
The other factor is that Xerox was based on patents for their copier. When this expired in the 80s, other companies were free to make copiers and improve them. My career was in It, and I learned to keeep documents in electronic form, not paper.
There have been many companies that have appeared to be dominant in their market and then severely downsized or went out of business on their own as part of the business cycle. That is why I find the constant public outrage at so called monopolies so crazy.
Every time the government has investigated and begun antitrust litigation the company in question is already facing challenging market conditions before the case is resolved. The only time two examples of the government forcing a company to be broken up are Standard Oil and AT&T. Standard Oil being broken up was the single most profitable event for Rockefeller and the other shareholders. AT&T was highly abused by the government throughout it's history and the restrictions on them have harmed consumers more than the company. Shareholders at the time of the AT&T case also benefited tremendously.
Yet, people who have not studied the history of antitrust policy insist government get involved and do something. If the government does something, the shareholders will benefit more than consumers. Which only makes sense. Breaking up a company creates multiple startup companies with leadership and a culture that made the business large to start with.
their innovations got xerox'ed
I worked for Xerox PARC, and it was pretty clear that nobody paid attention. We even had Xerox PARC management who said how Canon, who made cameras (go ask your father what one looked like) and jumped to ink jet printers, was leveraging their technology while we were not. At PARC, our Xerox computers were black and white while our departments were using Suns (ask some old guy from IT), and context-sensitive soft keys (there’s a good reason why you don’t know what they are - context is.a terrible user-interface). Oh, and Xerox PARC invented the mouse, but it had three buttons, so, unless you know what a ‘chord’ is, while Xerox PARC invented your grandfather’s technology, they didn’t make it usable - despite how much they tried.
My dad was an executive for Xerox during this ending. That finally makes sense... it was probably mid 2000's when he left.
Yeah, he had little interest in keeping up. I know his boss did too.
And thank you this answers many questions that I always had. Naturally, I despise apple.
Success can also cause a company to fail in that it allows them to get away with inefficient processes.
Yeah this is what happens when everything is geared towards “creating value for the shareholders”. 😃
From 1980 to 1982 I worked for a company called Linotype Paul. We created systems for the printing and publishing industry to print their papers and magazines. We had quite innovative hardware and software to writing, justifying, setting etc., material to be printed. Then we heard about the Xerox Star - it was way ahead of anything that we had. But it just disappeared.
Glad u made this video. Xerox PARC and Gary Kildall were the most revolutionary tech innovators ever. Xerox copies by itself are the greatest invention of mankind.
And later the founded the first GUI, Mouse, laptop/PC concepts, O/S - things which were copied by all other tech geeks.
These videos are addicting
1:20 - lol. Where did you get that article from. I was intrigued just by the title of the article. LMAO
Hahaha, it’s in the description if you’re interested
I never knew Xerox was the OG, I'm blown away!
I remember our first printer was a Xerox all in one for like $400, which back then was about $700 in today's money.
Xerox and AT&T Bell Labs are the same companies who invented a lot of things but it end have nothing in their hands
After watching this great video, I'm still confused about why Xerox is going bankrupt? Their main customer I would think is corporate America and those businesses, still have a nees for paper backup, and office paper sourced materials. Wouldn't this steady customer be enough to keep them still in the game? They mention one part of the growing lack of need for paper copies in light of e signed documents and cloud storage prefencing, but still there's a need for the physical paper copy. I don't really see the failure of the company even in today's world! I would appreciate any answer to my question!
In 1974 the base patent protection for dry copying expired, many new competitors e.g. from Japan emerged (Canon, Ricoh…) and outperformed them by lower prices, better quality, better service and innovation in general. They lost market share and became mostly irrelevant today.
I remember the end of 80s the famous law suite between Apple and Microsoft over who copied who’s graphic Interface ended with the judge saying basically “xerox invented the graphic interface, neither of you has the copyright”
I remember Wang computers, they made mainframes and minis like the VS. They were relatively cheap but you got slugged on the maintenance costs. Wang continued with this model until they ran out of customers.
There are other examples such as Kodak and IBM.
I remember a small business wanted to donate a Pr1me computer to a school in the late ‘80s. I spoke to Pr1me but they wanted the school to pay a compulsory maintenance agreement of $1024 a year so the donation was turned down.
At the time I didn’t think a school could really use a business orientated mini computer anyway.
The vision for the future died with the founder. Everyone who remains is just too comfortable.
Wait till you learn about Fairchild, and what they could have been
I once had the luck to get a tour with a long time engineer of the company and I asked him, how does it feel when you invent something so good, but you dont get credit for it, including financial rewards. He said something like this: we invent to make the world better and to solve problems, and having something you did become useful in society, that is all the reward you need.
In the early 70s, our high school had a Xerox machine. It cost $0.25 per sheet to make a copy. Needless to say, most copying was done with the Gestetner machines.
I love the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" movie precisely because they show so perfectly how ignorant and oblivious top executives at both Xerox and HP were about the impending PC revolution. The top engineer at Xerox PARC shows visible frustration when the boss at Xerox's HQ tells her how ridiculous it sounds that Xerox could sell something called a "mouse". Then she's enraged when those same executives order her to allow Apple inside their labs to look at everything they're doing showing her how little Xerox actually cares about all those great inventions they have lying around. She's reluctant at first to even look at Steve Jobs' face because she knows he and his people will just steal everything, but since they show much more interest about everything and are actually eager to learn from her and her team, she just relents and asks them what they want to know. I hope that woman got hired by Apple in the end and made bank.