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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

This link led me on to a little bit of wikipedia reading where I learned something that really surprised me: according to wiki, Xerox today still employs more people than either Microsoft or Apple, 130k to their 115k each. Am I the only person who finds that shocking? I had no idea they were still so huge. And this despite their market cap being a hundredth of Apple or Microsoft's.

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"Employment" like everything is subjective. Contractors don't count as employees. Foxconn employees doing Apple's manufacturing don't count as employees. It artificially decreases the people count depending on the company's FTE ratio.

Also consider the different industries. Xerox may need on-the-ground support staff to go onsite in numerous countries, in a way Apple does not need to.

HP tops all of them at 300K (or rather, did until the formation of HP Inc.).

IBM currently at 380K according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM

Wow. What do those people do? For that matter, what does Xerox do these days?

Xerox these days still make photocopiers, but they also work as really nice printers and network connected scanners.

I imagine a lot of their employees are in the service division. When you buy a high end printer it also comes with a service contract where someone will proactively come and do things like clean the printer and make sure toner is stocked.

I work in a building next to a Xerox rented building. Apparently Xerox does a lot of government contracting. They bid on government IT contracts and hire people to work on them.

Even after the Conduent spin off?

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