from Hacker News

Fujifilm to take over Xerox in $6.1B Deal

by isarat on 1/31/18, 6:47 PM with 51 comments

  • by Bokanovsky on 1/31/18, 9:24 PM

    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.

  • by Multicomp on 1/31/18, 8:38 PM

    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.

  • by atarian on 1/31/18, 9:38 PM

    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?

  • by gigatexal on 1/31/18, 8:41 PM

    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.

  • by ysleepy on 1/31/18, 9:23 PM

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

  • by jacobush on 1/31/18, 8:33 PM

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

  • by drderidder on 2/1/18, 12:02 AM

    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.

  • by taoistextremist on 1/31/18, 8:26 PM

    >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.

  • by reiichiroh on 2/1/18, 5:17 PM

    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.

  • by tonyedgecombe on 2/1/18, 11:41 AM

    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.

  • by dang on 2/1/18, 8:14 AM

  • by jlebrech on 2/1/18, 12:12 PM

    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