The industry has been shrinking for 15 years and all Xerox has done is put future into debt with the failed ACS purchase. Management has known about issue for long time, however short term goals, little to no vision and greed has continued the track of going out of business. There are lots of examples where business have re-invented themselves in changing times. We are on track to be the next Blackberry or Yahoo. Its a shame, it was a great company with great people.
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Technology can quickly cause drastic disruptions that few large companies with deeply engrained roots can handle. Digital camera technology took out Kodak. Email and eDocs are taking out Xerox. There are many examples of disruptions, and there will be more to come. I think Xerox did the best at what they do best which is "printing". It doesn't make sense to blame Xerox for failing to profit from Email and eDocs disruption. Xerox is still the best at printing, people are simply printing less.
Getting into services was not a bad idea. Buying ACS was a bad idea, their model was/is flawed. We overpaid for the company, Burns didn't properly understand what she was getting into. Had we bought a company that had a product, had a platform to build upon, we could have had another completely different market segment to go into to compliment our printing business.
Instead, the whole thing soured and split off, at a cost of how many billions?
Definitely agree - it's the people - very sad that we will be an MBA case study of what 'not' to do in a very short time. So very sad