Xerox’s most recent trend in business and the financial market has not appeared to be too successful. Xerox is cash strapped and desperately dodging bankruptcy. Xerox executives, are trying to dig out from a series of bad business decisions, must tame $17 billion in dept-including $1.4 billion due during the first half of this year alone. They hope to raise $4 billion by selling assets-including PARC, according to rumors last fall. But rather than auction off its golden goose, Xerox has asked PARC to find investors willing to pump in money without meddling with its research culture. Why would any investor want to hand over its cash without attaching any management strings? The answer lies in PARC’s burgeoning intellectual-property portfolio, an asset that Xerox has been accused of fumbling repeatedly Rae-Dupree of US Business & Technology (3/12/01).

ic as a test of the user interface: Cookie Monster, from Sesame Street. Two years later, Xerox was selling a mail-order computer kit called Altair 8800one of which inspired a young hobbyist named Bill Gates. But except for the laser printer, Xerox consistently failed to exploit PARC's innovations. Instead, the company pushed the Star workstation, released in 1981. Within six months, IBM had released its first PC, and the Star was obsolete. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Apple Computer (both of which appropriated their design philosophy from PARC) were on the rise. Hiltzik focuses on the human dimensions of the story, taking full advantage of the rich cast of characters involved in earth-shaking developments. Rae-Dupree of US News Business & Technology (3/12/01) says that this band of scientists had ideas to explore what this brave new world of free-flowing information might be like. The results exceeded everyone’s expectations. The Palo Alto pioneers not only explored the digital future they invented it.

Pacetta writes about the change he made for Xerox in Cleveland Ohio. He wanted the sales force to focus on key points: change was already happening, expectations were set, nonsense was out, the work ethic and the customer were in, people were going to enjoy working in Cleveland for Xerox, and we would be tough but fair. He first felt he should recognize the heroes in the sales force. Xerox handles marketing the way a wise combat commander conducts a firefight. If your troopers can't hold the ground, pull back to a defensible perimeter where you can reorganize and launch a counterattack. Pacetta went on to say he taught the sales force that sales is basically a three-step process. First, you have to identify the prospective customer; second, develop and convincingly present a proposal that will meet the customer's needs; and third, ask for the business. It all starts with preparation. Perhaps the parent company at Xerox is now taking steps similar to Pacetta with Anne Mulcahy at its reins.

The mighty Xerox machine has of late become more like an adding machine, an ancient workhorse being shunted aside by smaller, cheaper and better gadgets. For any office worker who has cursed a paper miss-feed or the dreaded ADD TONER warning, the end of the copier's reign is welcome. But it has put Xerox, the $19 billion-a-year imaging pioneer, in quite a jam. Like AT&T, with its shrinking long-distance business and any number of one-technology companies before it, Xerox is caught in what business gurus call a paradigm shift. And it is desperately trying to figure a way out. As white collars increasingly rely on e-mail and download documents from the Net, fewer copies are being made each year, and sales of machines are nearly flat. At the same time, traditional analog copiers are being replaced by hybrid digital devices plugged into a computer network and capable of copying, printing and scanning. At the high-tech, high-output end of the copier business, in a segment Xerox once had all to it- self, competitors have finally caught up. To make matters worse, the company's immensely proud, eve

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