Perhaps this dying company is just a victim of rapid technological change but I often wonder if Xerox would have succeeded if it had had more competent leaders? Maybe everything would be different if the leadership knew how to carry out a successful transformation of the company? It is only certain that it is not worth staying here anymore and that those who have already left can consider themselves lucky.
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Xerox definitely has the resources/money to move outside of paper printing industry and move onto creating fabrication machines that can automate manufacturing and assembly lines? Id--t board of directors thinking that paper printing can last forever... I agree with the comment below about how Xerox needs to pivot their strategy.
Living in the 80s! There’s never been money for systems improvements but by golly let’s get more consultants in to tell us we need to upgrade systems!
Xerox got knocked down when competitors started to muscle in and always seemed to be working from a position of weakness. This has been the death spiral we are seeing.
You all are basically the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company of printers.
The Office’s largest things they touched on was a company needing to adapt to a very rapidly technological world. It took Xerox until late year to finally get into the 3D printing industry, and the launch was terrible because it was in the middle of COVID. Frankly I had to Google, “Xerox 3D printing” because I had no idea if you all were even doing this.
It’s funny because during a recent conversation with my boss, he said, “Nowadays, people have MP3.” since he was talking about things he did in the 90s and I interrupted him and said, “What’s an MP3? MP3 is as relevant as CDs nowadays. Now we have cloud services like Spotify that play music since the internet is everywhere you go.”
If Xerox doesn’t want to implode as a company, there’s really a lot they can do:
- Identify what their competitors are doing better than them. The answer could very well be marketing.
- Pivot corporate strategy to cloud solutions to compete against Google and Microsoft. Google Drive with Google Docs and Microsoft OneDrive and Microsoft Office are probably one of the best things they’ve done for businesses because there’s access to documents everywhere people go. It’s easier to lose paper than information on your computer.
- Pivot corporate strategy to fulfill the needs of this new era of business operations where people work remotely or sometimes go into the office.
Xerox is a company that pretends that it’s still in the 1990s. What if computer companies who are also your competitors (like Dell or HP) said one day, “Forget it. We want to stop supporting Xerox printers for our PCs because they are a competitor of our things.” You could make this argument about Microsoft and their operating system but PC providers spend a lot of money to have Windows on their PCs. Your company does not pay anything for PC makers to support your printers.
Not to mention the bare bones and continually waning staffing levels
had many chances to diversify in the past, all very well known examples by now. today too incompetent to do anything so only looking for outside quick fixes to purchase and pretend that's a real strategy. fat lady is singing unfortunately