Despite its all-American parentage, Xerox Corp is a very British company – it is endlessly inventive, but others always seem to reap the benefit of its inventions – be they the local area network or the guiding principles behind the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh – while Xerox is forced to fall back on its stodgy copier business. Now however, William Lowe, who came on board late last year after getting the message that IBM believed he had a great future behind him, is taking the company back to first principles and taking the copier as the starting point of whole string of office automation products. Next year, reports the New York Times, Xerox hopes to come out with the first digital copier, one that will take the image and digitise it before printing it out, so that the user can intervene and edit the image before making the copy. But innovation still rules, and rather than scan the image line by line, Xerox is playing technologies that could make copying faster, cheaper and simpler, notably a using a sheet of amorphous silicon to capture the entire image in a single exposure. And once the image is digitised, as well as being stored and edited, it can be transmitted by facsimile, making the office copier a much more versatile piece of equipment. And William Lowe will no doubt be hoping to have the opportunity to prove that IBM made a big mistake when it ceded its copier business to Eastman Kodak Co last year. And with the computers that Xerox will need in its new copiers, and some innovative image technologies of its own plus an enormous customer base with feet so itchy it needs some pretty hot new properties to keep it loyal, the idea floated earlier this year that Wang Laboratories Inc might join forces with Xerox Corp in a merger could make a lot of sense..pl 63
