
Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal - isarat
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-xeroxcorp-m-a-fujifilm/japans-fujifilm-to-take-over-xerox-in-6-1-billion-deal-create-jv-idUSKBN1FK025
======
Bokanovsky
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
TomMarius
Are there any details on how this worked? Sounds awesome.

~~~
Angostura
Here you go.
[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/ab.html](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"

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Multicomp
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.

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

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atarian
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?

~~~
pjc50
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.

~~~
dracodoc
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.

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gigatexal
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.

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ysleepy
Maybe the horrendous bug in the Xerox copiers that replaces letters and
numbers with perfect looking different ones gave that brand the rest.

~~~
julianz
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-...](https://www.crn.com.au/news/false-accounting-and-fictitious-
sales-at-fuji-xerox-australia-nz-470035)

~~~
thspimpolds
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.

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jacobush
As long as they keep making film (instant and regular) I'm happy. :-)

~~~
ojilles
And the X100!

~~~
jacobush
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.

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cvaidya1986
End of an era.

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drderidder
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.

~~~
Animats
_Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age_ \- Hiltzik

~~~
drderidder
Thanks for the recommendation!

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taoistextremist
>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.

~~~
Multicomp
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.

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reiichiroh
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.

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tonyedgecombe
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.

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jlebrech
I was a bit confused at first as Fuji Xerox is already the name of the joint
venture between the 2 companies.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuji_Xerox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuji_Xerox)

------
dang
Url changed from [https://petapixel.com/2018/01/31/fujifilm-takes-
xerox-6-1b-d...](https://petapixel.com/2018/01/31/fujifilm-takes-
xerox-6-1b-deal/), which points to this.

