Xerox: New Market. New Xerox.

was gonna be a two parter. Uh. I was certain that's as long as it was going to need to be, because I thought, even though there's a lot of stuff that Xerox has contributed to technology, I could probably sum it up in two parts. But the interesting origin of Xbox ended up taking Xbox Xerox took up a lot of time, and the Xerox origin having so little to

do with what Xerox does today. I mean, it was about photographic paper, uh, and if it would it would not even evolve into photo copy years until decades after its founding. But it was really interesting to hear about the different values that were instilled as part of the corporate character of Xerox. Then all that stuff about the Palo Alto Research Center or Xerox Park was also incredibly fascinating.

I mean, Xerox Park is where a lot of development happened on things that are now standard in personal computers, but at the time it was all very much cutting edge technology. I mean, the park started in nineteen seventy and they started working on things like graphic user interfaces, computer mouse, bitmapped icons, lots of stuff that would find its way into standard computer use more than a decade

later was happening at Xerox at the time. And finally, as I was looking into more recent years at Xerox, I realized I couldn't just summarize what had happened. If I did, it would be short shrift and we'd be going bullet points, and that's not how I like to do this show. So I decided I needed to go into more detail. So that's where we are now, at the thrilling conclusion of the Xerox story. So so far, anyway, I mean, we gotta mention that's not really the conclusion.

The company does still exist, although it has gone through some pretty major changes barely recently. So let's jump back into the main company of Xerox. In our last episode, we switched to focus on the Palo Alto Research Center once it was found in nineteen seventy. But what was going on back at Xerox Prime during that same time. Well, in the early nineteen seventies, everything was going pretty well over at Xerox. They had created the most profitable product

of all time with the nine fourteen copier. Remember it was called the nine fourteen because those were the dimensions of paper it could accept. It could accept up to nine inches by fourteen inches, and us was a photo copier that could make copies much faster than alternative methods. It also was less messy than using something like carbon

copies and a mimiograph machine. The company also held patents on the various technologies that went into photo copiers, so it gave them an effective monopoly on their specific approach. You know, if you patent a technology, no one else is allowed to create a technology that works that same

way unless they first pay you a licensing fee. If you agree to license it, then sure they can do it, but otherwise you have exclusive rights to that technology until the patent expires, which is a little bit more than a decade. Well, the profit margin on those big enterprise machines. Enterprise being that they were selling these two companies right they were not selling nine fourteen copiers to the average consumer.

They were selling them to big offices. The profit margin was super high, like in the seventy percent range of the money was pure profit. That means that they were able to sell the machines for more than what it costs for them to build them. And that's an incredible profit margin for any kind of technology. And that just means that they were really expensive machines and people were willing to pay for them because of the level of

convenience they offered. But as Joe Wilson, who was one of the early leaders of Xerox, might have said, sitting back and relying on past innovations can only be effective for so long. The patents on xerox Is technology were close to expiring, so pretty soon anyone with the means could use those same approaches to make similar technologies. And that seventy profit margin, while it was great for Xerox right there at the moment, meant that other companies would

have a chance to come in and cut prices. Maybe they're looking for a profit margin that's a lot more modest, and they could end up selling their copiers for far less than Xerox was and undercut the competition sition. In nineteen seventy one, Joe Wilson passed away. Now I mentioned that in the previous episode, so I'm not going to dwell on it here, but his passing was marked by public displays of respect across Rochester, New York, where he grew up, where he lived most of his life, and

also within Xerox itself. Archie McCardell became the president of Xerox, while C. Peter McCullough remained the CEO. You remember McCullough took over for for Wilson. The mid seventies started to get a little more challenging for Xerox. First of all, you had other companies like Cannon and various copier companies in Japan entering the marketplace with competing products. Xerox still

made up the majority of copiers in the marketplace. They were effectively a monopoly for the for several years, but they soon had to contend with these newcomers. Later, still, IBM would get into the copy of business, which was also a little bit foreboding to Xerox, and a few

there's also started to kind of dip their toe into it. Meanwhile, companies like HP, we're working on technologies that would bring them into competition with Xerox in ways the copier company couldn't anticipate at the time, like in ink jet printing. In jet printing, while it's not the same thing as photo copying, did allow people to make copies of stuff by printing extra copies as opposed to printing one copy and then taking that to the photo copier to make

more copies. HP took some of the need away from offices from having these giant photo copiers. So it was a level of competition that Xerox had not anticipated. Xerox began to see that incredible domination in the market start to lose ground. In fact, it began to lose ground pretty dramatically over the next several years. Now, in the last episode, I mentioned that Xerox Park was hard at

work on several innovations, one of the biggest being the Alto. Now, this could have been the first personal computer on the market. The Xerox Alto could have been the ubiquitous or personal computer. It could have been there instead of the Apple Too, But uh, that just didn't work out, and why Well, the reasons are a little complicated. First of all, Xerox Alta was years ahead of other products like the Apple Too,

because it actually did have a graphic user interface. It was essentially a Windows style machine, though Microsoft Windows did not exist yet, but it was that same sort of

user interface that Microsoft Windows would be now. The fact that Xerox didn't see the opportunity in consumer personal computers led a lot of people after the fact to say that they really were lacking foresight and initiative, and that they weren't embracing that spirit of innovation the way Xerox had earlier in its in its existence, that's a lot

easier to say in hindsight. At the time, it might have seemed weird to go into a consumer technology, which by definition tends to have much lower profit margins than doing these business to business deals which had made the company bookous of money's. Xerox ended up creating their first color copier, the Xerox hundred, around this time, so there was some still some innovation going on in their main business, and in nineteen seventy four, Xerox opened a new facility

in Mississaugua, Ontario, Canada. And I know, I know Canadians, I know I mispronounced it. I I realized that I feel shame, a deep sense of shame and despair. But I'm just a simple man reading notes off my computer screen, so so give me some slack. This was the Xerox Research Center of Canada, also known as the x r c C. Initially the purpose of this research facility was to engineer new chemical processes and products for use in

xerox is businesses. Today, the x r c C bills itself as quote Canada's leading materials research enter and home to a world class team of scientists and engineers with broad expertise and materials chemistry, formulation, design, prototyping, testing, and chemical process engineering end quote. They work both with Xerox and external customers, which typically would be other big companies.

Now Xerox agreed to license copier patents to other companies, which seems really big of them, right like they were they had all these these different patents that kept them in this effective monopoly. Seems really generous to agree to extend licenses to various companies, you know, in exchange for a fee seems really nice. Well, it wasn't out of

the kindness of xerox executive's hearts. Xerox had actually become the target for an antitrust lawsuit and the government was essentially demanding that the company offer up licensing agreements for their patents. So this was kind of the company's way of soothing things over. Within a short amount of time, the move did exactly what the people at Xerox were afraid would happen. It allowed competitors to leverage Xerox's technologies

and so copiers for much lower prices. Xerox is near one market share would drop below twenty percent in just a couple of years. That's dramatic when you go from a percent market domination to less than twenty percent of the market in some cases, I've seen estimates between thirteen and fourteen percent. That's crazy. It is, however, something that we've seen in other technologies like smartphone operating systems. iOS dominated shortly for a while, and then Android caught up,

and then now Android dominates just by sheer numbers. Was also the year that Xerox stopped trying to make mainframe style computers. They got out of that business. They had bought into it a few years earlier, and it turned out they just could not make that business work. Five was also the year Xerox launched an incredibly popular advertising campaign.

This was called the brother Dominic campaign. It featured a monk creating an illustrated manuscript by hands, so he's writing out in calligraphy this manuscript, only to be told by his superiors that they need hundreds more copies. So the monk takes his illustrated page to the copy center in the monastery, since we all know that monasteries have these, right and he then goes and makes five hundred copies

using a big Xerox machine. And when he returns to his superiors shortly after he was asked to make the copies in the first place, they look at the amount of work he has accomplished so quickly and reply, it's a miracle. Now. This campaign would include several more variations on this theme and would make a return just a couple of years ago with an updated technology found in Xerox document centers. So it's a very popular, award winning

ad campaign. And again not just a couple of years ago, they did an update that was kind of cute about how you could use Xerox technologies to do things like translate documents. It could have automatic detection of language and then translated into other languages and print it in those other languages, which is pretty cool thing. Actually, it seems kind of magical to me. I guess it is a miracle.

In nineteen seventy six, Kodak, remember that was Xerox is old competitor from the old old days when it was the Halloyd Corporation. Kodak was the big boy in town and Halloyd was the teeny tiny little competitor. Well, now Kodak switches the the scales and becomes the smaller competitor in the copier game. That add more pressure onto Xerox. This was also the last year that Xerox sold a

nine fourteen copier six. They phased it out of sales from that point forward, although they did still provide field service for nine fourteen copiers that had already been sold to customers. Zero made a move in nineteen seventy nine to purchase Western Union International that ended up being a failed experiment. The company was trying to create a telecommunications network.

They were really looking to diversify beyond photocopying, so they were they were definitely looking at ways that they could branch out so they weren't dependent upon a business that was getting siphoned away from them. But this telecommunications network experiment was a failure, and in nine Xerox would sell off Western Union International to m c I, and they took a loss on that sale, so it was an

expensive lesson to learn. In nineteen eighties, Xerox formed an official environment, Health, and Safety organization and became one of the first big American companies to do so. The purpose of this group is to design and implement environmental and

sustainability programs at Xerox. By Xerox had started to introduce the Star computer workstation, which was technically the first consumer computer to feature a mouse, and whizzy Wig software wasizz the Wagan case, you don't remember, stands for what you see is what you get, So you can actually edit within the framework of whatever document you're using, and it looks exactly the way it should when you print it or produce it. This is standard today, but back back

then it was not standard. The thing that you were looking at on a screen often had very little relationship with whatever it would print out on a piece of paper. But this Star computer workstation was not compatible with other systems and was a bit underpowered all things considered, and ultimately it languished in the market. Apple computers would pass it by easily, even though they didn't have all the bells and whistles that the Star computer workstation did back

in one. Apple would catch up by eight four when they started to incorporate the Mac operating system and had their Windows based user interface incorporated in that. But at the time Xerox's computer was was pretty advanced from a software perspective, hardware it was kind of lacking in McCullough stepped down as the CEO and David Kaarns became CEO of Xerox, and one thing Kairns did was to guide Xerox into some acquisitions to expand the company into financial services,

including insurance. Eventually, this would become a huge burden to the company as it found itself financially obligated to resolve billions of dollars in insurance liabilities. So it became kind of an albatross around the metaphorical neck of Xerox. At this point, the revenues of the company were eight point

five billion dollars. Xerox would continue to experiment with new products, including new copiers that had micro computers incorporated directly into the product that of course has continued up to present day. And it also had a low bandwidth ethernet as a communications interface built into these new copiers, which is kind of cool. Xerox also produced a fax machine in nine that could be linked by network to other office equipment, So again they were producing some stuff that was ahead

of the curve. But around this time Xerox also pioneer to practice that you might not be aware of. It's kind of creepy. So laser printing was becoming more commonplace in the early nineteen eighties, and that included the capability to print in full color with certain types of printers. One concern that arose from this development of technology was the possibility of using that kind of printer to produce

counterfeit documents and currency. If you could make it look convincing enough, you might be able to have a pretty convincing counterfeit and pass it off as the real thing. Now, Xerox determined that one way to protect against this, or at least track instances so that you could find their points of origin. Would be to include some sort of encoding strategy so that the printers being used would print a tracking information directly on to the paper and do

it in such a way that it's not obvious. And thus tiny yellow dots began to find their way into print jobs. Now, those yellow dots, which are easiest to see if you shine a blue led light on the paper, encode specific information onto the paper itself. The information includes the serial number of the the printer, the date of printing, and more or the copier as well. So the dots are yellow and paper is typically white, and that means you have a very low contrast between the toner and

the paper that makes it really tricky to spot. And the dots are actually pretty tiny, so it's likely you would not notice them without a magnifying glass and a blue light. But if you wanted, you could shine a blue light on a piece of paper that had gone through a Xerox printer or copier, you could use the magnifying glass, you could find these dots, and you could track any document back to the printer that produced it.

You'd even know when the print job took place. The day would be included in that information, and that sort of information could be come in particularly handy during a case involving counterfeits. But it might creep you out to know that your print outs have been including information about you, or at least your printer all the way up to

this point. This's, by the way, a standard practice. You can find lots of printers that will include stuff at a very tiny, unnoticeable level, at least unnoticeable to the naked eye, but they leave traces that make it much easier to figure where did that piece of paper come from, who printed it? Including it as a serial number, and the serial numbers registered to somebody, it makes it much easier to track down the origin of that piece of paper, at least the print out, not the paper itself. So

it's kind of creepy in a way. It's also potentially useful. Now. Law enforcement, for their parts, say that they don't really use this unless they're looking into counterfeits. They're not necessarily taking every sheet of paper that has been printed it and then looking for these dots and then tracking it back to the original printer for further investigation. But still

kind of interesting. Something I was not aware of before I started doing the research for this podcast, and we've got a lot more to say about Xerox to wrap up this story. But before I get into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In six years before the Worldwide Web with debut, Xerox made a very forward thinking move. The company registered a top level domain www. Dot xerox dot com. This was the seventh top level domain to be registered with the United States

Department of Defense. Ever, so when you look at the top level domains, Xerox was the seventh one. And if you're wondering about that last statement about the Department of Defense, you need to listen up on the old ARPA net

podcast past episodes I did. The Department of Defenses Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA, which would eventually evolve into DARPA, was responsible for designing the foundation for what would become the Internet, So all the protocols, uh, they really got their start both in arpanet and over at xerox Park Xerox Park, they did a lot of work that would end up being incorporated into the fundamental design of the Internet. Before the Department of Defense essentially backed away from being

the caretaker of the Internet. All registration ultimately went to the Department of Defense. So think about that, if you wanted to register at top level domain, you had to send that information to the Department of Defense. That's not intimidating at all. But Xerox got in early, well before any domain squatters could come along and mess things up. Xerox produced it's two millionth copier in nineteen The company was really starting to face fierce competition in the space.

At this point, Xerox's main concentration remained the enterprise business. Uh, they kept on focusing on those big corporate clients as opposed to trying to really break into the consumer marketplace. In nineteen Xerox introduced docu Tech. That's a product that allowed for scanning, editing, filing, and printing jobs all from one product. So kind of like a a photo copier on steroids, right. It's the machine that just can do anything, the Swiss Army photo copier. That's also the year that

Paul A Laire would become these Xerox CEO. Now A Laire had been with the company since nineteen sixty six, and it would be when he becomes CEO of the company his first moves as CEO were to divest Xerox of several of the financial services departments the company had formed in an effort to diversify like those insurance companies I was talking about. The revenue of the company at that point was thirteen point six billion dollars. Xerox Park. Meanwhile,

Create did something kind of cool. It was called lamb Da Move, which you might think that means that Xerox was genetically producing Greek yogurt or something, But that's not what was going on, at least not that I know of. Anyway, Maybe they were doing that too, but that's not what Lambda move was. Lambda move was an early multi user object oriented online environment. MOVE stands for multi user object oriented or sometimes MUD object oriented. MUD, by the way,

stands for a multi user dungeon. So it all it gets very recursive. Think of it as a text based environment that allows people to log into it remotely and interact with one another. It's a fancy type of chat room that has some added capabilities, like little spaces that you could define as channels or rooms of their own, as well as programmed objects within it that can sometimes produce effects based upon commands you would type in, but

it's all text based. Was also when Xerox introduced the DocuTech Production Publisher, the first in its DocuTech series of products. It could make copies, manipulate documents, capture images, and more. Xerox was adding new features and development from the Park team in order to differentiate as products from all the

copiers that were coming out from competing companies. So while other companies were selling copiers at lower cost, Xerox started producing some that had added features that you could not find in the competitors products. In three's Severe Tire Damage performs a live streaming show at Xerox Park, using the multicast backbone to send the performance over the Internet. I actually covered this in an episode of Tech Stuff not

too long ago. I cannot, for the life of me, remember what the topic was, but I remember talking about severe tire Damage doing their live cast, and I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that I've gotten to talk about severe tire damage twice in the same few months. It always seems like it was like a couple of weeks ago, but I know it was longer than that. Xerox underwent a little rebrand ding. The company would do this several times over the next

couple of decades. They changed their corporate symbol from blue to red. It had been a blue Xerox, Now it was read, and the symbol itself was turned to a partially digitized X. The company also began to refer to itself as the Document Company dash Xerox. In nineteen ninety six, Kodak got out of the copy of business, so that helped a little bit. Xerox revenue hit seventeen point four billion, and in nineteen seven Zerox released the Document Center digital

copier products. On June of nineteen seven, g Richard Toman left IBM to join Xerox. Now Toman was tapped to become the successor to Paul Alaire and would become president and CEO in nine seven. This marked the first time someone from outside Xerox assumed the role of president. On April one, nineteen ninety nine, he would be named CEO and a Laire would resign from being CEO. Remember, Xerox had this policy that when you hit sixty it was time for you to resign as CEO. It didn't matter

what kind of job you were doing. That was the tradition that had been established, so if you hit sixty, it was time for you to get out. Now, a layer would step down a CEO, but he remained the chairman of the Board of Directors. You might think April one is a pretty tough day to get named to any position, and in this case, you're absolutely right, because it ended up being a not so funny joke on Tommin. Within thirteen months of assuming the role of CEO, he

would be relieved of duty. Specifically, he would get the message from a layer that the board wanted Toman to resign from his position or be forcibly removed from it. In fact, some of the board members said either he goes or we go as and members of the board were threatening to resign unless Tomin was taken out of the office. So what the heck was happening? Well, first of all, to go back to nine nine seven, when Tomin became the president and CEO. That was a real

tough year for Xerox. The leadership decided that they needed to do a massive reorganization and re prioritization, which directly translated into cutting jobs. In to the tune of nine thousand positions that represented about ten percent of Xerox's workforce, So just imagine going to work and seeing that one out of every ten of your co workers is gone.

That did not help at all that Tomin was coming into this position, and also that Tomin was coming in from outside Xerox rather than rising up in the ranks. He didn't have the relationships that other Xerox executives had formed within the company. A lair who stayed on the board was kind of the opposite. He had been around since nineteen sixty six, and tom And encountered resistance when

he went about to make changes. For one thing, he found it difficult to convince the board to hire the management team that he felt was necessary for him to get all the stuff he wanted done done. He was saying, well, I need the management team, but the boards blocking me on these moves. Now. A layer and several career Xerox employees felt that Tomin was really trying to change too much too quickly at the company and that he wasn't taking the time to form the right relationships at work.

Tom And, for his part, was frustrated at running into resistance and at the thought of having to behave in a way that wasn't aligned with his leadership style. He also said later that he should have insisted a Layer step down from Xerox rather than stay on as chairman. According to Tom And, he and a Laire had reached an agreement by which a Laire could attend top management meetings, but only if he remained quiet. So a Laire did

attend those meetings, and he did remain quiet. He didn't speak at them unless at all, but his presence alone was undermining Tommins authority, or at least seemed to at any rate, with top level executives at Xerox often looking at a Layer in response to questions rather than to Tom, who was the one who was actually supposedly leading the company. One month after tom And joined Xerox, the company stock price hit a historic high of nearly sixty four dollars

per share. In the third quarter of the company posted an eleven percent drop an income, and investors sold off tons of shares, cutting the value of the company by nearly twenty five percent. Imagine the value of your company goes down an entire quarter. It's you know, one fourth

of the value of your company is gone. It is very sobering By two thousand one, the price of the stock dropped down to seven dollars per share, and the amount of money that that represented collectively, if you multiplied all the different shares and you looked at the price, meant that the company lost thirty eight billion dollars. There was actually talked for a while of the possibility that

Xerox might enter inter Chapter eleven bankruptcy. As it turned out that didn't become necessary, but it was flirting with that possibility for a while now. Part of the loss was due to Xerox's international operations. The company had significant holdings in Brazil, and Brazil was suffering from a catastrophic economic crisis in two thousand uh and due to Brazil's weak currency, it led to Xerox losing about a billion

dollars of its net worth. Some people said that it was like Xerox was playing a game in in uh in converting currency from one form to the other, and it was losing. Around the same time, Xerox fired thirteen employees at its Mexican subsidiary on the grounds that they had allegedly cooked the books. According to Xerox, those employees conspired to make it seem as if the subsidiaries performance was far better than what it really was, So there was a lot of tension going on inside Xerox at

this time. Tomin was essentially forced to step down and an MML Kahi, who had been with Xerox for twenty four years, was promoted to president and Chief operating Office. She stated that Xerox had an quote unsustainable business model end quote on an analysis call, but then she did her best backtrack after that and say that wasn't really what she meant, but it caused a lot of stir that she said that xerox Is business model was unsustainable.

Moll Kay would lead the company to turn it around financially, so she actually was able to maneuver Xerox into making a profit again. By two thousand two, that was the case, Xerox was making a profit and more Okay, he would be both CEO and the chairman of the board of Xerox. Two thousand two was also the year that Park spun off as a wholly owned Xerox research company. It was

no longer its own division within Xerox. In two thousand four, ten years after Xerox rebranded itself as the document company, Dash Xerox. The company had another rebranding and went back to being just Xerox in its corporate signature, so that that X disappeared and the new logo was just the word Xerox, but in all upper case letters. Xerox had a really big year in two thousand six. That had been a hundred years since the company's founding, so it

was their centennial. Xerox also acquired a company called x Empie, which was a variable information software company, And you might wonder what that means. I did. I had no idea what a variable information software company did, so I went to x empi's web page and I read this. Here's a direct quote. X Empie, the leading provider of software of for across media variable data one to one marketing offers solutions to help businesses create and manage highly effective

direct marketing and cross media campaigns. So I guess it's a marketing company. By the way, this that that isn't very good. That's not that's not a very good mission statement. It's not written very well. I mean, first of all, it repeats the word cross media. You get cross media

twice in one and thence that's basic writing. One on one you don't use the same term twice, and it includes both the phrases one to one marketing and direct marketing in that same sentence, which are essentially the same thing. But hey, I'm just a writer, what do I know.

Mostly I'm just giving marketing companies a hard time since I find that they like consultants frequently obvious skate what they really mean with fancy language, and I just used off u skate And ironically, in two thousand and seven, Ursula M. Burns would become the president of Xerox. Burns had actually started at Xerox in nineteen eighty as a mechanical engineering summer intern. She went from being an intern in nineteen eighty all the way to becoming president of

the company in two thousand and seven. Now, that is a Xerox story that was more in line with the corporate culture horizon. The company was was very much in line with those traditional values, and people are often promoted within the company at Xerox as opposed to being brought in from outside. And we'll talk a lot more about what Ursula and Burns did in her tenure as president and later CEO of Xerox, But before we do that,

let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. In two thousand eight, just four years after they changed up the corporate signature, Xerox decided to do it again. This new version was still all in red, it was still the name Xerox, but now it was on lower case instead of upper case, and they also included a new image, a spherical red symbol with lines forming an X on it. More. Kay lead the company until two thousand nine, and that's

when Ursula Burns would step in as CEO. She became the first African American woman to lead a company the scale of Xerox. That same year, Xerox announced its intent to acquire a company called Affiliated Computer Services. So that's two thousand nine. Keep that in mind. This deal was massive is about six point four billion dollars in both

cash and stocks. The acquisition became official in February two thou ten, and Zerox would later sell off part of Affiliate Computer Services, namely the i T outsourcing business to a toss for more than one billion dollars, but they held on to the rest of it, so they split off like a division of this company they acquired and sold it off because it was not it was not progressing as quickly as some of the other business units,

and they didn't want to divide their attention too much. Now, the following years were pretty tough ones for the company. In January, Xerox issued a press release announcing that the company would split into two entities. Now this was largely because Carl Icon, one of the major investors in Xerox, had been urging Xerox to split into two publicly traded companies. One would become the document management business and would retain

the name Xerox. The second business, which focused on business services and was mostly the businesses Xerox acquired when it bought Affiliated Computer Services back in two thousand nine, became known as Conduit Ursula Burns would step down as CEO after the split happened, although she remained chairman of Xerox. Jeff Jacobson would join Xerox to become the new CEO, or rather he would become the new CEO. He was

already part of Xerox. He was a former lawyer who joined Xerox in at the officer level, so it's not like he worked his way up from the lowest levels to executive. He came in as an officer. He became the chief operating officer of Xerox Technology in fourteen, so just two years after joining the company, and then two years after that he became the CEO. Xerox is still very much in business. In the company announced a massive production launch of twenty nine new products, the biggest in

its history. The company has focused more on network document management, including solutions that allow you to send print jobs for mobile devices and massive documents centers. Also, I should point out that there's still a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen with Xerox over the next few months. There's some worry that there will be a lot of cost cutting measures, which often result in people losing their jobs.

Their entire towns that are really worried about what could happen in the future because Xerox is the major employer at those those towns, and some cases you're talking about people who are now working for a totally different company in Conduit. So there's a lot of uncertainty at the time being. And before I conclude this series about Xerox, I need to talk a little bit about this idea

of generic sized trademarks. So a trademark is a type of design, like a logo or a representation of a provider of goods and services that sets it apart from others in that same field. A trademark indicates that a particular product or asset belongs to a specific company that an official version of that asset. It means consumers know from whom their products originated. You can license trademarks to

others if you want to. And let's say, for example, you create a popular character on a television showing to children. It's a puppet of some sort, and you've trademarked the image of that puppet. That puppet represents your work. You've trademarkedt so other people can't just go out and make a copy of it, at least not without becoming um

liable for a terrible lawsuit. And you might have a toy manufacturing company being down your door to partner with you in order to produce toy versions of this trademarked character. You could choose the license the trademark character designed to that company and produce tons of toys and make wheelbarrows full of money. Lots of companies do this, But one thing that you have to do with a trademark is defended.

So if someone else starts selling toys of your beloved character and you do nothing to stop them as and you don't sue the pants off of them, then your trademark is actually in danger. If a court finds that you had the opportunity to defend a trademark but you didn't, they might say, well, your trademarks not valid because you

didn't actually defend it. So this is different from a copyright, which just stays there and you can sue anybody who infringes upon your copyright anytime during the duration of the copyrights legitimacy, which is a pretty long time in the United States thanks to companies like Disney. Trademark is a little different. You have to be very um aggressive in

defending your trademark. Again, if you look at Disney, you've probably heard stories about the company telling, say, a school, that it had to take down a mural that had Disney characters on it because they were unlicensed versions of those characters. And while you might say, well, where's the harm in a small school putting up a mural of

Disney characters. From Disney's perspective, the harm is that if they do not go forward and try to prevent people from using their trademarked intellectual property without without permission, then they lose They may lose the trademark protection in the first place, so they tend to be a little overzealous in protecting in order to make sure that doesn't happen. Um, if your trademark becomes invalid, you have no real legal protection to your expression and anyone can jump on it,

potentially confusing the market. As a result, you could always try and take someone to court, but it depends on again, if you haven't been very good about defending your trademark, it's not It's not great news for you from the court's perspective. One thing you definitely do not want is

a genericized trademark. Now, that's a brand name that becomes so synonymous with a type of product or service that people just use it for any instance of that product or service, even if it came from another company's products,

which can obviously devalue the trademarked intellectu property. So if you were to say I'm gonna go xerox this document instead of I'm going to photocopy this document or scan this document or whatever you're using xeroxes trademark name in a way that's more generic, and you might be using a copying machine that isn't even made by Xerox. For crying out loud, you could say, oh, I need to

go xerox this, and you're using a canon copier. Xerox is actually run awareness campaigns asking people not to use the word Xerox in this way. The company tried to appeal to the sympathy of the masses in these pieces, which are a little funny to read something that was not universally accepted as a serious message among all readers. After all, I mean, what does the average person care of a billion dollar company name becomes synonymous with the technology that at one time that same company had a

monopoly over. Right, Once upon a time, you could probably call it xerox NG because Xerox was more or less the only game in town. And if there's no one competing, then there's not really much danger of the trademark being infringed upon. Now, officially, Xerox is not a generic trademark. It's not recognized as a generic trademark, unlike some other products like aspirin is a generic trademark. Now escalators, linoleum.

All of those are generic trademarks, but Xerox is in a class of protected trademarks that are still sometimes used in generic fashion. So a couple of other examples in

that category would be Kleenex or band aid. So these are all things that are technically protected trademarks, but people use them pretty casually, whether or not they're talking about the specific products or services, or they're just talking about something similar that, you know, out of convenience sake, we use a single brand name band Aid, I think is

really a big one. Clean X too. Really, I mean, I don't know many people who say, hey, could you pass me a facial tissue or I would very much need an adhesive bandage to cover this gaping wound that has opened up on my hand. Ramsey. That's a hint. No, I'm just kidding. It's actually it's all right. I've I've got a I got I got an alley on my thumb. But it's okay at the moment. Now, I don't I don't need a facial tissue for my alley, Ramsey. Ramsey

is trying to be helpful, but he's handing me. Wait, that's actually, that's actually puffs, So that's not clean x some sellotape Also Sellotape, by the way, also used to be an actual brand name, but now as a generic sized trademark, as I recall. So I just wanted to take time to address that because it's one of those things people often think about when they hear the term xerox or or any of those other ones I was talking about, like, is that actually a generic trademark at

this point? Can anyone use it? Technically? No, you cannot market anything as xerox unless you are the company Xerox. And while you might call something a Xerox, or you might refer to xerox seeing a document that is not technically correct, and of course that's the most important type of correct. We all live on the Internet. We know that to be technically correct means that you win. Well. That wraps up the story of Xerox so far, anyway,

Like I said, pretty dramatic. You look at the humble beginnings of a tiny little company that was existing in the shadow of Kodak, to the Xerox Park days where incredible R and D work was going on that would shape our use of computers in the future. And yet the company was very much unable to capitalize on it, all the way up to the modern day where the company has recently split apart and people are still kind of wondering what's going to happen to it, And we'll

keep our eyes on it. Maybe someday it will warrant a part four, a kind of a catching up on what has happened so far. But until that day, we're going to put this one to bed. Guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff, maybe there's a topic you've always wanted to know more about, whether it's a company or a person or a technology. Maybe there's someone you think I should interview, or you have an idea of someone that you really want to

have on as a guest host. I know that I'm going to get Scott Benjamin in here pretty soon to be a guest host on an episode of Tech Stuff. We're gonna talk about some personal submarines. That's the plan anyway, So we're gonna chat about that in a future episode not too long from now. But if there's anyone else that you think, hey, you need to get so and so in there, let me know, send me a message. The email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Twitter or

Facebook handle it. Both of those is tech Stuff h s W. And remember you can always watch me record these shows live at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. I record on Wednesdays and Fridays. Just go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. You'll see the schedule there.

You can join in, be part of the chat room, watch me as I brilliantly make my way through my notes or sometimes stumble over my own words to hilarious effect, and you get to experience all of that before Ramsey goes in and does his magic and removes all the goof um ups and keeps all the good stuff, so you get to see the whole thing. I hope to see you guys there, and I'll talk to you again really soon. YEA for more on this and thousands of other topics, is a housetop works dot com