Le Monde | • Updated | By
No mercy for the castaways of digital. Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, has surrendered. It will cut his business in half. On the one hand, the activity of business services, on the other, photocopiers which made the fortune and the world-famous company. Heartbreaking for her, since it amounts to destroy his work, patiently built since 2010. At that time, she had put her hand to more than 6 billion dollars (5.5 billion euros) on the ACS company and its 74 000 people worldwide working in call centers and management systems for companies and administrations
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But she did not resist the steamroller Carl Icahn, the activist investor who jumped on this fragile prey. He was right. The company is going wrong long ago and can not recover. Its sales of copiers inexorably down, and even its business services recorded losses of contracts with governments.
Too messy, too late, Xerox did not carry the mutation fruit. It’s not for lack of trying. At the height of its power in the 1970s, thriving on strong patents, the company has even turned into star of Silicon Valley. Its Palo Alto Research Lab, PARC, had become a true Mecca of innovation.
have emerged as significant inventions of the Ethernet protocol, the GUI, mouse, all these bricks basic microcomputer. These discoveries will make the fortune of turbulent entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates … but not that of Xerox, which never managed to get out of highly profitable long term niche copying.
Celebrity Obsession digital
The art of diversification is difficult mix of strategy – what channels to borrow – and execution – how to combine growth and profitability. IBM has a successful shift to services and software, by gradually withdrawing equipment. Kodak has not been so lucky, Xerox either.
These are so diverse trajectories that obsess the new stars of the digital like Google or Amazon. We must move quickly on his heart craft in order to gain a dominant position, and at the same time, press it to expand its activities and find new pockets of growth. The gamble paid off for Amazon, which has just passed the $ 100 billion in revenues bar. Never seen in such a short time (twenty years). In 2015, its turnover increased by 20%, while its “physical” rivals saw their sales stagnate and close stores.
At the same time, the cost of this growth increases proportion and destroyed much of profitability. The markets very lenient towards Amazon, now appear to be frightened and sanction on the stock exchange, fearing that the giant trade losing his muscles, trying too hard to expand at all costs to escape the fate of Xerox.
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