The responsibility of the demise of Xerox rests solely on executives, some management, and corporate raiders

Remember, Xerox Direct was the cash cow for the company for many many years and paid for all of the channel expansions. We had high market shares in the largest accounts in the world. The employees were hard working, skilled, dedicated and paid very well (until abt 10-15 years ago). Unfortunately, Executive greed took over and began a systematic march to kill the division and hand the accounts to other channels. These are the accounts that Direct employees secured and supported.

The pace of account movement was accelerated. The accounts were handed to GIS which was very very profitable for GIS because they had zero customer acquisition costs. The argument could be made that some accounts should or shouldn’t be moved but that is irrelevant. The point I’m making is that GIS should have been the most profitable. It paid no aquision costs. Many hundreds of millions in customers were moved to GIS.

I don’t want to detract from the well run cores success prior to the acquisition, rather, I would place blame on the executives and dealers that sold out. Xerox had a long history of screwing up acquisitions before GIS came on board.

To net it out, nobody on the front lines of either business is to blame for this. Almost all were hard working and diligent.

The responsibility of the demise of Xerox rests solely on executives, some management, and corporate raiders.

On point post by @Y7jil0t-afn

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The only part of direct that was exempted from the closures of Y2K and still has local billing, IT, and demo rooms enjoys 90% market share to this day from A4 to production.

The local location, local support is the backbone. The box is secondary. You outsource that support off shore and watch customers simply pick the cheaper box

Over 100 Vice Presidents on direct side sapping from the P&L. Not to mention absurdly useless middle management who got there via the Xerox buddy system. My direct manager is on vacation. There is absolutely no difference in communication/guidance/help. I have no idea what he does. Five of my peers have left because of this manager and myself and many others have complained to his direct supervisor, yet, of course, no change.

Xerox Executives wanted GIS books to look the best, and therefor overhead and expenses that benefited all was never fair shared between direct and other channels.

Of course Direct looked less profitable. That’s the way they wanted it to look. They wanted to run it into the ground. They wanted to be more like HP. The irony.

That CEO would be Rick Thoman. For over a year they had to fly people to Chicago to help them close the books at month end because the people who in the customer care center who knew why they were doing were let go. A/R balances skyrocketed, customers wouldn’t pay their bills because they couldn’t get accurate ones, some customers weren’t billed at all, and for those that were billed accurately there was no one to follow up if they didn’t pay.

Xerox direct had local offices, local billing, local IT support. I forget the name of CEO who did away with that, but it really screwed up direct.

Thread regarding Xerox Corp. layoffs

The responsibility of the demise of Xerox rests solely on executives, some management, and corporate raiders

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