Xerox

Overview

Xerox Corporation is a major American corporation and brand that pioneered office technology as the first manufacturer of xerographic plain-paper copiers, headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut — and, almost as consequentially, the company whose copier fortune paid for Xerox PARC, the research lab whose inventions seeded the personal computer revolution at other companies (Britannica). The name began as a company and became a verb: so successful was the copier that Xerox has waged a continuing campaign to prevent its trademark from becoming a generic term (Britannica).

The company was founded in 1906 as the Haloid Company, a manufacturer and distributor of photographic paper (Britannica). In 1947 the firm obtained the commercial rights to xerography, an imaging process invented by Chester Carlson (Britannica). Renamed the Haloid Xerox Company in 1958, it introduced the 914 xerographic copier in 1959 — a process that made photographic copies onto plain, uncoated paper, known for some time but now in its first commercial application (Britannica). The product’s success and name recognition drove the company to change its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961 (Britannica). An earlier milestone, the Model A copier of 1949, was the first manually operated commercial xerographic printer (Britannica).

From copiers to computers — and back

After the success of its first copier, Xerox expanded into other information products and publishing businesses and founded PARC, a research lab in Palo Alto, California, in 1970 (Britannica). While remaining a major reprographics manufacturer, the company went on to develop word-processing machines in 1974, laser printers in 1977, and Ethernet, an office communications network, in 1979 (Britannica). It sold its publishing firms in 1985, and its product lines settled into copiers, printers, digital print production presses, and the software and systems support required for document production, with digital photocopiers following in the 1990s (Britannica).

The company’s later innovation record shows a firm still capable of firsts but no longer defining its industry. Xerox received the 2003 IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition award for its DocuTech product line, which combined copier and computer resources to allow digital transmission and storage of documents for print via a single machine, thereby creating the print-on-demand industry (Britannica). In 2006 it filed a patent for photosensitive “erasable paper” producing prints with images lasting only a day, allowing continuous reuse of paper, and in 2007 it acquired the technology sales and services company Global Imaging Systems and received the U.S. National Medal of Technology (Britannica).

The PARC paradox: the lab that enriched everyone else

PARC is the central irony of Xerox’s history. The lab was created in 1970 to explore new information technologies beyond the copier business, and the 1970s were a decade of fundamental innovation there — but, as Britannica’s PARC article puts it, its parent company failed to transform these ideas into dollars (Britannica). The pattern repeated with people as well as products. Xerox’s own researchers saw the future first and left to build it elsewhere: Apple founder Steve Jobs toured PARC in 1979 and carried its graphical-interface ideas into the Lisa and the Macintosh, and Xerox sued Apple in 1989 claiming it stole the GUI idea — a lawsuit dismissed in 1990 on technical grounds (Britannica).

The Adobe story is the sharpest case. PARC computer scientists Charles Geschke and John Warnock built their printing work at the lab, but when Geschke went to Connecticut headquarters to discuss a marketing plan, he was told: “At Xerox it takes seven years to develop a product — and we can’t talk about this because other people will get the idea and beat us to market” (Knowledge at Wharton). Frustrated, the pair raised $2.5 million from Hambrecht & Quist and founded Adobe in 1982 (Knowledge at Wharton). The Lemelson Center confirms the mechanism: Xerox made their Interpress language its internal standard but was not interested in licensing the technology to others, so Warnock and Geschke resigned from PARC in 1982 and created a new language from scratch — PostScript (Lemelson). In 2002 PARC became an independent subsidiary of Xerox, and in 2023 Xerox donated PARC to the research institute SRI International (Britannica).

Decline, services, and the Fujifilm deal that collapsed

Most of Xerox’s 21st-century innovations occurred under Anne Mulcahy, who in 2001 became the first female chief executive of Xerox and in 2002 its first female chairperson (Britannica). Upon her retirement in 2009, Mulcahy selected company president Ursula Burns as her successor — the first time an African American woman headed a company of such size, and the first time a female chief executive replaced another at a Fortune 500 company (Britannica). Burns’s tenure began as Xerox faced declining revenue, and she sought to transform the corporation by overseeing its 2010 acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), an outsourcing business-services firm, reflecting a trend toward services over products (Britannica). The move failed to reverse Xerox’s losses, and in 2017 the company spun off ACS and other service holdings as the independent company Conduent, the same year Jeff Jacobson succeeded Burns as CEO (Britannica).

Faced with continued decline, Xerox announced in January 2018 that it was being acquired by Fujifilm in a deal valued at more than $6 billion; the two companies had a standing relationship through the Fuji Xerox joint venture created in 1962 (Britannica). The proposed merger was strongly opposed by two major shareholders, Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, who believed Xerox had been undervalued; they filed a lawsuit, and in May 2018 Xerox announced it was calling off the merger, with Jacobson’s departure as CEO among the personnel changes announced (Britannica).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not assert Xerox’s current revenues, headcount, or product lineup — those were outside this research pass. It does not claim Xerox invented the photocopier from nothing: xerography was Chester Carlson’s invention, to which Haloid bought the commercial rights in 1947, and the 914 was the first commercial application of plain-paper copying, not the first copying process known. The “since 1948” framing in Britannica’s PARC article is treated as loose shorthand, not a product date (see open items). And it does not present PARC’s commercial failure as a simple story of stupidity: the sources describe distance from headquarters, a copier business that worked superbly, and a seven-year product cycle colliding with a fast-moving computer industry.