While many here will note the potential downsides for Lexmark here, the strategic fit statement of "Xerox and Lexmark have complementary sets of operations" likely means that Xerox will keep Lexmark operating as usual in the short term. And in the long term, there is a greater possibility of them growing the Lexmark side with their resources because Lexmark is an established brand, was already an existing partner/supplier for Xerox, as well as focused on certain growth areas (e.g., IoT, WFA) that Xerox did not.
Now, if Broadcom were to acquire Lexmark, they'd likely get rid of 70% of the people and focus on extracting more money from the top 10% of Lexmark users via a subscription model that would make HP look tame by comparison.
If I recall correctly, Xerox printers are rebadged Lexmark printers, with the exception of the highest end models.
Dell printers are also rebadged Lexmark’s. Or at least they were 20 years ago.
>"Xerox and Lexmark have complementary sets of operations"
To me that means, "we can save money because we now don't need 2 marketing departments and 2 accounting departments and 2 support departments, etc. for the same amount of combined market share."
Pretty sure that's what it means to everyone and that's what they meant to say.
Apparently WFA stands for Wi Fi Alliance. Or maybe Wilderness First Aid, which makes more sense in the context of a "growth area".
It stands for Work from Anywhere
I used to fix Lexmark printers , they are "PC load letter" printers. not as bad as HP but lexmark printers stop working for various no reasons. Most of the time the trays would mess up due to a little dust or you would have to get the person to smack the drum over the phone and that would usually help. they never stop working but they will crumble 10 pages into a ball inside the machine ha..
side note . HP printers are the worst for PC load letter. I've fixed HP printers my whole life. I love reading the manuals and they use "might" or "maybe" to describe fixes or errors.
PC Load Letter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER
Counterpoint: I also used to fix Lexmark printers as a field tech servicing pharmacies. It was routine to see Lexmark MS711dn printers with page counts in the millions. They did not need more than basic maintenance.
no fuckin way .. i used to work for Kroll Pharmacy in Toronto!! where were you!?
Lexmark was the supplier of Model M keyboards for a while, after IBM spun their printer & keyboard business off. Which they later spun off into Unicomp (pckeyboard.com) who still manufacture them in the town of Lexington.
If you've never used a Model M, they're beasts. Great mechanical feel (they have buckling spring technology). And they're heavy enough to not slide around on your desk.
I bought a Unicomp Type M once to replace my IBM because it had USB, more keys, etc. It was Model M “Lite”: same key feel, same delightful clicky, but much lighter and more flexible.
You could march into battle with an IBM Model M. I don’t think you could take on more than one local thug with the Unicomp version.
I was all excited for the TKL Unicomp keyboard they introduced a couple years ago. I bought one the second it went up for sale, and plugged it in right away when I got it. I had to ditch it after a few hours. It turns out that certain keypresses won't register if another key is pressed at the same time, and I type fast enough that it was losing keypresses regularly. I haven't had a keyboard with this problem since about 1985. An unconscionable design mistake which tarnishes the entire Unicomp brand for me.
New keyboard testing metric just dropped over Christmas break.
I mean, this is the keyboard people use to run through the dishwasher to clean it. You have to come up with more advanced criteria to really tease them apart.
(I just realized that "flexible" above might be interpreted positively, like "applicable in more situations". No, I mean "flexible" as in "may not be satisfactorily used as a bridge over a pothole in case of emergency", which the original would be able to pull off and still be used to write a blog post about the experience afterward.)
They're wonderful things, unfortunately Unicomp has not introduced the latest keyboard layouts that have been introduced since 1988. So I can't get my beloved CAN/CSA Z243.200 for a battle-capable keyboard.
My unicomp model m died after a few years. I never found time to return it to unicomp for repair and ended up discarding it to clear my long to do list. Reportedly, there were cost saving changes over the years that reduced weight and reliability. The weight reductions are definitely real. I might have just been unlucky with the keyboard failure, although I assume it involved the circuitry for making it work with USB, which the original model m keyboards did not have.
I have the 122-key version and a ton of Emacs bindings to make the most out of the 24 function keys and the 12-key panel on the left. It is simply the best.
I used to work at Lexmark in the same lab as the son of Neil Muyskens, who founded Unicomp.
My 1986 M is still going strong.
> If you've never used a Model M, they're beasts.
I jokingly call it the preppers keyboard as it can double as a clubbing weapon when SHTF.
That is only the older ones. The newer ones are mostly made out of plastic to save money.
It's amazing how they had a whole stamped metal frame in there to stiffen it up. Like what was the design criteria that made them think they needed all that steel? Violent cavemen users?
I got a Lexmark for their driverless IPP Everywhere support and it's the best zero-fuss printer I've ever owned.
Xerox doesn't have any IPP Everywhere devices, so I hope this isn't Lexmark's death knell.
I don't know what an IPP is but I bought a networked Xerox all in one, plugged it into my network and it just showed up on all my devices (mind, they're mostly Apple). So whatever they're doing, it ain't so bad.
I did have to cover the power led with black nail polish though. It was lighting up the whole room.
Current Xerox printers definitely do support IP, but you need Windows to configure them (the proprietary app that will connect the printer to the network only runs in Widows).
I use black electrical tape for those ever-more-common nuisances.
You can also get sheets of hundreds of small little black dot stickers that are perfect to use on LEDs. Some of them are thin enough to let some light through an individual one, so you can choose to dim or entirely block by adding one or 2-3...
Painting the printer in Vantablack is also an acceptable answer.
That might be the one thing more toxic than toner powder particles.
> Lexmark creates cloud-enabled imaging and IoT technologies that help customers worldwide quickly realize business outcomes. Through a powerful combination of proven technologies and deep industry expertise, Lexmark accelerates business transformation, turning information into insights, data into decisions, and analytics into action
Great, so I have no idea what they do.
I'm convinced only CEOs know how to translate that into English.
Company descriptions like this ought to be written as if you're explaining what your company does to a 6 year old. Imagine explaining your job to a class of first graders and telling them "I accelerate business transformation!" Yea, they'll be as lost as the rest of us.
Everyone at the top is clueless, faking it, and anxious they’ll be found out.
Someone please turn that into a the backing vocals of a techno song.
> Lexmark creates cloud-enabled imaging and IoT technologies
We make printers
> that help customers worldwide quickly realize business outcomes.
To help you do business
> Through a powerful combination of proven technologies and deep industry expertise,
We've been doing this for a while
> Lexmark accelerates business transformation, turning information into insights, data into decisions, and analytics into action
We help your company get important work done
On this last point, a company is more than just its products, technology, and IP. It's people. People that are hopefully empowered and educated to make nimble decisions and rapidly respond to changing conditions.
But yeah, they sell printers.
Spun off from IBM to end up at Xerox 30 years later.
I haven't followed Xerox in the last - 20? years, so I don't know how terrible could this be.
Xerox is essentially a Lexmark reseller at this point. You can look at what Xerox technicians are posting on reddit if you need evidence:
https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/15sa0q4/why_do_th...
As per a comment there, even the toner cartridges are the same, with the only difference being the chip used.
This acquisition should make Xerox into a company that builds its own printers again.
Ah, interesting. I guess they were manufacturing the bigger corporate machines, and rebranding this medium/small sized printers. They also had solid ink printers (we had one in the office a long time ago) but I think they aren't doing them anymore.
I bought past year a bunch of Xerox branded toners for an HP printer, and I didn't know they had diversified the business that much. I wonder if they manufacture them.
Intersting, I didn't realize there's a relationship.
But Wikipedia says:
> Lexmark was formed on March 27, 1991, when investment firm Clayton & Dubilier completed a leveraged buyout of IBM Information Products Corporation, the printer, typewriter, and keyboard operations of IBM
Lexmark being IBM’s former printer division is well known. Former employees purchased the keyboard business from Lexmark and made Unicomp.
Meanwhile, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was IBM’s hard drive division and Lenovo was their PC division. IBM has sold off so many parts of itself over the years it is surprising there is much left.
Yep, I still have a couple or three Model M keyboards, and although all are IBM branded, if you disassemble them you'll find that, depending on the year, they were IBM or Lexmark manufactured.
Also, IBM laser printers from the 4019, 4029, 4039... series started to appear branded as Lexmark. At least if I remember correctly from when my father worked at a bank. Our equipment at home was a less fancy IBM Proprinter XL24. Noisy!
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This is unfortunate for Lexmark employees.
this headline feels like i'm in 1996 again
Bought a Lexmark E232 laser printer back in 2006. 18 years and 110k pages later the damn thing still works flawlessly. I have nothing but admiration for their printers.
How do you know it’s been 110k?
Growing up in Rochester, NY, where Xerox was founded and has/had the most employees... I'm just glad to hear they have enough resources to acquire something. Been a rough couple decades.
Why would Ninestar sell off Lexmark, is it just that they got a good price? I thought the pantum and printer business was an interesting move, but maybe they just couldn't make it work.
Ninestar was already having problems in the US. In 2023 they got an import ban by the DHS [0] and Lexmark had to find a new supplier for whatever Ninestar was sending them. Lexmark had to sell some assets this year to add a bit of liquidity [1].
I guess this is Ninestar "just" getting rid of Lexmark because it was getting a bit messy for them.
0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-puts-chinese-company-with-kentucky-ties-on-forced-labor-ban-list-ce2e8d00
1: https://www.opi.net/news/region/001-north-america/ninestar-offloads-lexmark-assets/I wasn’t even aware Xerox was still around..
Same. I had to look them up, apparently PARC is still a thing. I had no idea.
PARC isn’t part of Xerox any more. https://www.news.xerox.com/news/xerox-announces-donation-of-...
Not only are they still around, they are a Fortune 500 company with over 7 billion dollars in revenue. They offer not only printers and copiers, but they are also a a business services company.
Basically there are a ton of very large companies that even people in at least adjacent spaces just aren't aware of. Way back in my product manager days, we'd have companies into our executive briefing center who made 80% of the country's <fill in utterly pedestrian product you never even think about>.
So many people have and are making so much money just doing mundane business things.
It’s quite a change from the fast moving world of tech startups.
Meanwhile Xerox is making little money or even a loss doing mundane things.
Look at their share price over the last 25 years if you want to see what a dismal company Xerox is.
It's probably a market failure if you can make loads of money (profit rather than revenue) doing mundane things. If your moat isn't something like novelty or patents or concentrated unique expertise then you should be just scraping by in an ideal scenario. You might say they have trust or brand recognition or whatever, but that shouldn't prevent new entrants in a market where the products aren't developing quickly and you can undercut them by taking a smaller margin.
Doing the mundane exceptionally well is...exceptional. No reason why that shouldn't also be profitable.
Nobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well.
But seriously, you'd have to say how it is that your maker of mundane widgets can do a much better job than any competitor. Maybe the company is run by a printer savant, ok. But if it's just because you have good practices they should be copyable, if it's the best employees it should be possible and worthwhile to coax them away, etc.
A reasonably defined "efficient" market is one that will chip these differences until you have only normal profit being made while making an acceptable product. A long term super-normal profit making a commodity is the opposite of efficiency.
Brother has made exceptional printers. I have one of their small office lazer printers/scanners and it is the first time I've ever enjoyed a printer. Works great in my Linux-only house. I have it hooked up as a network printer.
I'm not sure anyone is saying there's an extraordinary profit margin being made. But if you're the dominant supplier in some niche and your customers don't have any real complaints, you can still make a lot of money and, as a potential new entrant, your niche probably doesn't have a lot of appeal to me unless I have a genuinely new idea that would have broad customer appeal and I can execute on it.
>Nobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well.
My first job (in 1982) was writing barcode software for Printronix printers. They still make them now, largely unchanged [1]. They were built like a tank.
> Nobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well.
Brother.
At least as a consumer printer, they do seem to have emerged as a can't really go wrong option. I finally junked my inkjets because I didn't use them enough to keep the ink from drying out. I don't print a lot but I find it useful to have a printer in the house to casually print out recipes, travel info, and the like.
I spent some of the formative time in my career at Lexmark. They sponsored my GEM Fellowship for grad school, and I worked there for 4 internships in 4 years in the mid 2000s. It was an interesting window into the business world.
- Lexmark came into existence when IBM wanted to spin off their declining printer, keyboard, and typewriter businesses, which were headquartered in Lexington, KY, hence the name.
- According to some of my coworkers, IBM brought all the most dynamic leaders back to the mothership, so Lexmark was left with whoever stayed behind or was left behind. These folks weren't highly respected by the engineers I knew, but I can't really judge, personally.
- As many of you all know, some IBM/Lexmark manufacturing folks arranged a deal to take the keyboard business independent, as Unicomp.
- In a major settlement with HP over patents, the two companies had a full exchange of printing technology, resulting in Lexmark gaining cutting edge laser printing tech. According to people I know, this turned a moribund company into a player.
- Lexmark became most well known for bringing the "razor blade" business model to consumer inkjet printing. They would literally give printers away with a manufacturer's rebate, hoping to make the money back on supplies (e.g. ink cartridges). Unfortunately, there were so many printers floating around that many people would just throw out the old one when it was out of ink. It was a catastrophe.
- When I was working there, one of the major initiatives was to create the cheapest possible inkjet printer. On the other hand, there was still a lot of pretty cool R&D going on. Just nowhere near the level of investment HP was making.
- Lexmark became infamous for attempting to enforce DRM on its supplies to prevent people from refilling ink cartridges, forcing them to buy high margin supplies. While I was there, we were shipping cartridges with write-once memory for tracking usage.
- In parallel to consumer inkjet, Lexmark had an almost completely separate business unit doing business printers, based on laser printing technology. In this market, you sell full on documents capabilities and services, with the printer merely being the central piece of hardware.
- A few years after my last stint there, Lexmark exited the consumer inkjet business and became solely B2B. I didn't follow the company closely after this point.
Working at Lexmark was one of the things that convinced me to leave tech for education. I enjoyed my short stints there, but just found the environment completely uninspiring as a place to really establish my career. Being my main exposure to the tech career (along with previous internships at manufacturing companies), I assumed that this was what the whole industry was like. (I returned to tech a few years later, but that's a whole other story.)
Wonder why it happened? anyone know the back story?
Maybe the both had a similar AI strategy
And the AIs decided they should merge.
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I had to Google what "send me a Xerox" means.
Your comment made me reach for a kleenex to wipe my eye.
Xerox PARC invented the desktop metaphor, the GUI, and the computer mouse.
Then you're just dating yourself at likely less than <35 years old (or never worked in an office during those years.)
Also if you don't know what a Xerox is, then you might not know about PARC and The Mother of All Demos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
If you're a computer nerd and don't know about this, you are welcome.
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> I would think that the market for printing is shrinking with more documents being sent via the Internet
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...and they both will sell rebadged Samsung printers happily ever after.
HP brought Samsung’s printer division, while Lexmark makes most Xerox branded printers, so that seems unlikely.
oh no
This may be devastating for the small city of Lexington, Kentucky. Seems like this was one of the only major businesses in the area.
I'm local, I know a ton of former Lexmark people, because they've already been all-but dead in Lexington for some time. They mostly only did R&D here for decades, and that group has been dwindling.
Large groups of Ex-Lexmark folk have ended up in other local tech companies, many ended up at OpenText (via HP via Exstream, the eventual successful startup from a local serial entrepreneur that basically makes the tools to do semi-individualized bulk mailing like bills), Badger (robots for doing retail work) was founded by folks leaving Lexmark, etc.
Amazon has been buying up their old buildings (long, long ago it used to be a sprawling IBM campus that did typewriters, printers, keyboards, compilers, EMI testing...) as they contract.
Like much of the US, Lexington has lost a bunch of manufacturing, but IBM/Lexmark as a major entity is already long gone.
It is funny that they've been bought by a cartridge cloner, and foreign private equity, and are now being bought by a competitor, they keep dying in new ignominious ways.
> many ended up at OpenText
I really want to know what the deal is with OpenText (formerly MicroFocus). If you're not careful they will eventually buy your business and you will disappear.
> OpenText offers cloud-native solutions in an integrated and flexible Information Management platform to enable intelligent, connected and secure organizations.
That… wow…
I remember Lexmark just before things started to go bad for them, back when they still had a huge campus with multiple buildings, developers had their own office or shared with one other person and they owned their own huge park with a disk golf course. They even built a new building on campus for an employee daycare and acquired multiple software companies to add services on top of print.
We had huge teams of software engineers, embedded software developers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers chemists and specialists in microfluidics. We designed our own image processing ASICs, had specialists in color and perception, had a whole team dedicated to just Linux and dedicated software librarians. There was a team working just on Android. We contributed back to Linux as well as Yocto/Bitbake. The first sign of decline was when suddenly (for me anyway) they announced the closure and sale of their entire consumer inkjet division followed not long after by commercial inkjet. They sold all the inkjet assets off to a partner manufacturer company a bit like Foxconn.
It was wonderful for a while and I am sad to see things get potentially worse for them.
When they hired me out of college, they paid me a $5000 relocation bonus, paid a specialized company to organize the move (even offered to find me a realtor and help sell my house if I had one), paid the moving company in full, paid to have my car relocated there, paid for hotels during the move and then paid me another $5000 to cover any miscellaneous costs from moving that I might incur. They also paid the taxes for me somehow, I guess by adding extra to my paycheck. Never seen the like before or since.
Those were the days! I have great memories playing in the basketball league and playing pickup soccer on the giant fields.
I worked one internship in the color / image science lab, which was super interesting. I learned a lot about the human visual system and theories of image reproduction technology. One of the guys in the lab reached some legendary engineering status ("laureate", I think) for inventing a form of dithering that improved perceptual image quality.
Lexington has a surprising amount of employers, we should be fine. I doubt they're going to close the HQ anyway.
Did you know Tempur-Pedic is Lexington grown? Fast food chain fazolis is based here, long John silver's was. Valvoline moved here a long long time ago.
Hall Rogers is trying to make "silicon hallow" a thing so there's a lot of funding for tech companies to setup shop in Kentucky
Fazoli’s is still around? I don’t think I’ve seen one in 20 years
I have a Fazoli's and a Xerox facility within 20 minutes of where I sit. I'm unsure I should see that as sign of a healthy economic situation for my neighborhood.
Yep, land-locked Lexington, Kentucky, home of Long John Silvers though we don’t even have one in town anymore. The last one closed a few years ago.
But yes, a Lexmark sale won’t make a large impact even if they shut down the HQ. There are local and remote (obviously) opportunities and the CoL is low here.
Lexington is the home of the University of Kentucky. Lexmark shuttering their plant wouldn’t be _good_ for the economy, but Lexington is first and foremost a “college town.”
I live there and while I know people who used to work there and have friends of friends who do work there it’s not considered a major player in my mind. Toyota leaving would be a much bigger deal and we have a decent number of local tech jobs not to mention remote work from elsewhere.
That’s not to say I don’t care or am happy they got bought but Lexmark has been circling the drain for a solid decade.
Lexington, Kentucky will not be “devastated” by this at all. I doubt Lexmark is even in the top 10 of businesses people would name for being big players in Lexington.
Lexmark has been progressively closing their facilities there for years. They even sold some buildings this year [0]. Thay have only 14 positions open for their Lexington location, so I don't think they're a huge employer there anymore.
0: https://www.opi.net/news/region/001-north-america/ninestar-offloads-lexmark-assets/
1: https://www.lexmark.com/en_us/careers/job-locations/lexington.html> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employers_in_Lexington...
Apparently Xerox, out of all companies in the world, is in the small list of even bigger employers than Lexmark there.
Lexington is 320k people, the second biggest city in the state. It's the only major shopping destination for eastern KY. It'll be fine.
(I lived for a year in Morehead, drove to Lexington regularly)
T-Rex feasts on Triceratops carcass, Asteroid Nears Earth, … all that and more Dino News just ahead… but first, why are some brontosaurus investing in these new small fuzzy creatures?
Brontosaurus and T-Rex are separated by 80 million (!) years.
To put it another way:
We are closer to the the asteroid than Brontosaurus is to T Rex.