If you are doing something so well and making tons of money, why spend money on what will absolutely ruin your core business? Personal computers weren't just going to supplement the copier business, they would seriously ruin it. But there was also a chance computers would flop so why spend the money on trying to ruin your core business and not succeed? People found uses for computers that the pioneers could never imagine so why would some CEO be any more imaginative? Disruptive tech usually doesn't come from the big companies, it comes from little guys who can take the risk because they have nothing else to fall back on. The big companies only get into it when they see that there is an actual market.

Your summary doesn't address and can't possibly apply to the period from ~1980 to 2005, during which personal computers were well established.

Also, it's the exact same generic story people tell about, say, Kodak.

Kodak gets picked on unfairly. They weren't completely blind to the digital camera revolution, they produced the first digital camera prototype but it was laughably incapable. Their problem was building a business model that took a cut from every picture snapped, from film to processing to printing. There was nothing in the digital camera model that could duplicate that revenue stream; even if they had sold every digital camera ever made, it would not have saved them. Their final undoing was overestimating the importance of printed pictures, in the end it turned out people would rather see their pictures on their screens.

Sadly, no business opportunity can be so idiot-proof that management can't prove themselves to be better idiots.

What would you have done differently than Xerox management?

Probably you, and most people on HN haven't been paying attention to them in a long time, but what happened in the last 15 years or so, is that they decided to diversify out from copiers into services.

It sounds vaguely plausible, people obviously deal with documents mostly on computers and not paper these days, so why can't they help with that?

Eventually they acquired a fairly big, but not a household name, outsourcing company called ACS. I used to wonder why Google couldn't do the same stuff, but they did in fact outsource, probably because it was the data processing equivalent of cleaning toilets.

But then a notorious corporate raider, aka Carl Icahn, came in and forced management to break up the company in the name of shareholder value, isolating the copiers in one business, and the document services in another, basically ACS under a new name.

Who's right? Diversify or get back to basics? It seems sometimes it's just random. You can come up with platitudes justifying either.

This may kind of seem like normal corporate America, but it just seems a bit uncharitable to call the CEO an idiot when you look at how the people running GameStop or whatever have had things a bit easier with billions being thrown at them.