zlacker

>>mfigui+(OP)
"I told them Xerox has got to get itself together, because there's no way a big company can take advantage of things moving this fast. People will get frustrated and start their own companies."

—Carver Mead, 1979 (employee at Xerox PARC), discussing why Xerox needed to focus more on adopting integrated circuits into the computers they had already developed, instead of continuing to just make increasingly-obsolete copiers.

>>Prolly+H1
> 1979 ... increasingly-obsolete copiers.

In 1979, I doubt copiers were 'increasingly obsolete'; I'd expect the market was growing rapidly. Laser printers, email, the Internet, didn't yet exist; PCs barely existed, and not in offices. Almost everywhere would have used typewriters, I suppose.

>>wolver+A6
Xerox's copier sales peak was in the early 70's, and then multiple international companies [primarily in Japan] began creating better, less expensive copiers. By the late 70's, Xerox was massively losing marketshare [to both competitors, and to blossoming word processing technologies].

>Laser printers, email, the Internet, didn't yet exist

Actually, all three did; the latter was in the form of ARPANET [to be technical, not "The Internet"].

>>Prolly+o7
One of us needs sources, and I think it's you :)

> Actually, all three did; the latter was in the form of ARPANET [to be technical, not "The Internet"].

True, but a technicality. Very few people knew they even existed, and they had zero impact on Xerox copier sales.