Yet the strategic damage was permanent. Xerox had been forced to retreat from the low-end market. It remained a strong player in high-volume "production" printing and services, but it was no longer the invincible giant. The 1990s saw a series of CEOs try to redefine Xerox for the digital age. Paul Allaire (CEO 1990-1999) pushed the company into document management software and services, renaming the company The Document Company (tagline: "The Document Company – Xerox"). But the transition was painful. The core copier business was mature, and new digital initiatives were slow to profit.
Xerox is the quintessential tale of . It is a parable of how success can breed myopia. The company invented the PC, the GUI, Ethernet, and the laser printer – the building blocks of the 21st-century office – and gave them away for free because they didn’t fit its existing business model of selling copies per page. It is a permanent case study in business schools about the "innovator’s dilemma": The very management practices that make a company dominant in its market make it nearly incapable of responding to disruptive change. 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. Yet the strategic damage was permanent
The brand name "Xerox" remains one of the most famous in the world, a genericized trademark like "Kleenex" or "Google." But the company is now a mid-tier technology services and printing firm, a resilient survivor rather than a world-beater. It serves as a powerful, cautionary ghost at the feast of every successful technology company: Are you building the future, or are you building a better buggy whip for the present? The 1990s saw a series of CEOs try