Xerox Wikipédia [hot] «Certified · BLUEPRINT»

Then came the crisis. By late 2000, Xerox was hemorrhaging money. Its business model of leasing copiers (long-term revenue) required huge upfront capital. When sales slowed, it ran out of cash. Debt was downgraded to "junk" status. The stock price plummeted from $60 to under $4. There were serious doubts Xerox would survive.

Xerox executives from the East Coast, whose entire business model was selling large, centralized copiers, could not comprehend the value of small, networked, personal devices. When Steve Jobs of Apple visited PARC in 1979 in exchange for allowing Xerox to invest $1 million in Apple (a deal that would net Xerox over $100 million), he saw the future. He famously remarked, "Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing." Xerox let the GUI and mouse slip away. Apple released the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984). Microsoft later copied the concept for Windows. Xerox’s own attempt to commercialize the Alto, the Xerox Star (8010) in 1981, was technologically brilliant but priced at $16,000+ per workstation, a commercial failure. xerox wikipédia

Haloid spent years refining Carlson’s invention. The key challenge was finding a better light-sensitive material; the solution was , which could hold an electrostatic charge and dissipate it when exposed to light. To brand this new process, Haloid coined the term "xerography" – from the Greek words xeros (dry) and graphein (writing). In 1949, they launched the first crude xerographic copier, Model A , but it was manual and messy. Then came the crisis

However, this pivot left the original hardware business weakened. The rise of the "paperless office" – ironically enabled by the scanning and digital workflow technologies Xerox had helped create – steadily eroded the demand for printing and copying. When sales slowed, it ran out of cash

The response was a multi-billion dollar loan, asset sales (selling off its stake in Fuji Xerox, which was painful), and a massive layoff of 20,000 employees. But the darkest chapter was the . To hide operational problems and meet Wall Street expectations, Xerox executives had manipulated its leasing revenue accounting. In 2002, the SEC charged Xerox with fraudulently accelerating the recognition of equipment revenue by over $3 billion and inflating pre-tax earnings by $1.5 billion. The company paid a $10 million fine, restated five years of financial results, and its auditor, KPMG, was also sanctioned. The scandal was a humiliation. V. The Modern Era: Services, Fujifilm, and the End of an Era (2002–2024) Under Anne Mulcahy (CEO 2001-2009, the first woman to lead Xerox), the company physically and financially stabilized. She is widely credited with saving Xerox from bankruptcy. Her successor, Ursula Burns (CEO 2009-2016), was the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. Burns pivoted the company aggressively away from hardware and toward business services.