Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal

I 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.

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?

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-...

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.

They have a relationship that spans decades, with a very successful joint venture in FujiZerox, so they seem like a natural acquirer.