Xerox
Strategic Mistakes by Xerox CEO
"Xerox: The Copier Company" epitomizes one of the greatest strategic blunders in the history of high technology corporations. The legacy of C. Peter McColough's tenure as CEO at Xerox was that he gave away the future of the company while he was at the helm. When McColough took over the reins of Xerox in 1968, Xerox was fully enjoying the 40-45% growth in their 80% copier dominated market share. McColough had the vision to see that in the office of the future, information would be stored electronically and he wanted Xerox to dominate the storing and reproduction of digital information just as it had dominated that on paper. To this end, Xerox developed the first personal computer three years before the first Apple computer and more than eight years before the appearance of the IBM PC. Having the computer and networking businesses firmly hooked, McColough failed to reel them in.
At the outset, McColough appeared to be the champion of his company and perhaps the entire business era. For example, to ensure Xerox's presence as a leader in the "architecture of information," McColough established the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to develop digital office technologies. After all, he reasoned, the best way to predict the future was to invent it. In the early 1970's, many corporations were cutting their R&D budgets while Xerox, on the other hand, provided unlimited funding to PARC who gathered together a team of world-class researchers in information sciences and physical sciences. This team invented virtually every aspect of today's personal computer, including the graphical user interface, on which Windows and Apple are based, along with the mouse, the laser printer, computer networking, internet protocol, bitmapped graphics and e-mail. Despite these profound achievements in computer technology, Xerox is still known as the copier company because McColough failed to commercialize or protect this new technology.
Nature and
"Xerox: The Copier Company" epitomizes one of the greatest strategic blunders in the history of high technology corporations. The legacy of C. Peter McColough's tenure as CEO at Xerox was that he gave away the future of the company while he was at the helm. When McColough took over the reins of Xerox in 1968, Xerox was fully enjoying the 40-45% growth in their 80% copier dominated market share. McColough had the vision to see that in the office of the future, information would be stored electronically and he wanted Xerox to dominate the storing and reproduction of digital information just as it had dominated that on paper. To this end, Xerox developed the first personal computer three years before the first Apple computer and more than eight years before the appearance of the IBM PC. Having the computer and networking businesses firmly hooked, McColough failed to reel them in.
At the outset, McColough appeared to be the champion of his company and perhaps the entire business era. For example, to ensure Xerox's presence as a leader in the "architecture of information," McColough established the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to develop digital office technologies. After all, he reasoned, the best way to predict the future was to invent it. In the early 1970's, many corporations were cutting their R&D budgets while Xerox, on the other hand, provided unlimited funding to PARC who gathered together a team of world-class researchers in information sciences and physical sciences. This team invented virtually every aspect of today's personal computer, including the graphical user interface, on which Windows and Apple are based, along with the mouse, the laser printer, computer networking, internet protocol, bitmapped graphics and e-mail. Despite these profound achievements in computer technology, Xerox is still known as the copier company because McColough failed to commercialize or protect this new technology.
Nature and