Url changed from https://petapixel.com/2018/01/31/fujifilm-takes-xerox-6-1b-d..., which points to this.
Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#32It'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
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#33It'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
Agreed, that is a great book!
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#34As long as they keep making film (instant and regular) I'm happy. :-)
I'd be happy if they'd sell Velvia 50 for large format outside Japan.
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#35There 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.
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#36I was a bit confused at first as Fuji Xerox is already the name of the joint venture between the 2 companies.
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#38I 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 sala…
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.
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#39It'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?
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.
Re: Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal
#40I 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 sala…
This is pretty accurate. I mean, I’m sure you remember the xww intranet prefix. Such odd quirks there