With publicly traded companies, often times pressure on the stock price and devaluations of credit ratings cause those in charge to make short sighted, rash decisions. This is what is occurring now.
First, Xerox's processes are awful. They are bureaucratic and simply do not work well. Moving down to XBS (aka GIS), they had some really smart people running some of the larger businesses. There was tons of overlap in geographic areas where there were redundancies of executives that simply were not addressed or merged. That was dumb.
Back to the over-reaction. Xerox is in full cost cutting modes. Their insurance offering to employees is not good, the 401K match was slashed, and they are blindly cutting people without consideration of what they did. Next steps will undoubtedly include the outsourcing or consolidation out east (which is a joke as they s--- at everything they touch) of many finance functions (AP, AR, etc) due to the need to cut short term expenses. The long term effects of doing this are irrelevant to them.
If you work at one of the subsidiaries, be careful and prepare for a job change or being on the job market unexpectedly. It's the world we live in now (thanks Mr Icahn.)