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The Once and Future C&F - Xerox, the Accidental Savior
In tech circles, Xerox is famous for squandering an opportunity to change the world. The story is that Xerox home office types invited Apple’s Steve Jobs for a visit to its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to check out what they were developing. The horrified PARC researchers were directed to show Jobs all the amazing technology they had developed in the mid-1970s — essentially everything necessary for modern personal computers, including graphical user interface, WYSIWYG display, mouse, keyboard, laser printing, Ethernet connections and a prototype personal desktop computer. According to Steve Jobs, “They had no idea what they had.” Computerworld summed it up in a November 6, 2000, article titled “The Xerox Tragedy”: “The fate of Xerox can be traced to 1983, when conflicts between its computer-oriented innovators and xerography-focused sales force were settled by dooming the inventions from the company’s Palo Alto Research Center to being technological marvels without competent marketing to sell them. Shortly thereafter, Xerox management crippled itself from participating in the information races altogether by taking much of its cash and investing in ‘safer’ business lines such as insurance.” Other stories from that era have titles such as “Fumbling the Future” and “Xerox: The Downfall,” as the one-time glamor stock plunged from a high of $149 a share in 1972 to $37 in late 1982. Analysts soon questioned the wisdom of the C&F acquisition, noting how diversification into the depressed insurance industry could not deliver the growth Xerox investors had been promised. Before mutual funds allowed everyone to diversify their investments, corporations tried to diversify on behalf of their shareholders as an alternative to paying dividends. While the rise of the mutual fund industry
Page from the Xerox Annual Report, 1991 with Stu Ross (front) and C&F colleagues.
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