Xerox to acquire Lexmark | Hacker News Reader

Xerox to acquire Lexmark

newsroom.lexmark.com

263 pointstaubek214 comments

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.

Yeah, both Xerox and Lexmark are such blasts from the past for me. Surprised they still exist in any form.

Yeah, this article was a bit of a surprise to me. I would have assumed Xerox at least had been out of business for ages.

I saw an ad for Packard Bell on Instagram yesterday. I looked it up quickly, apparently they've been selling computers this whole time, owned by different parent companies though.

Wow, I've always thought that company merged into half of Hewlett-Packard. I'm very surprised to learn just now, after all these years, that they're completely separate.

What a trip. I remember playing with them in stores as a kid.

I'm surprised that anyone prints anything any more. Such a waste of paper, toner and ink (the most expensive liquids on earth).

Tritium begs to differ.

I haven't used an inkjet for years but it's useful to print a few pages here and there on a laser printer for reference.

Nope, at least some of them are built in collaboration with Samsung. I remember using the same Samsung 1710 drivers to drive similar looking Xerox models. Information pages and everything are similar too. Only the logos differ.

It's also same for Samsung MD2825 series. Xerox builds the exact same network enabled printers, but also they add WiFi on top of it. They're very reliable too. I have one and it's working without any problems for a decade.

OTOH, Xerox's high end printers and "digital presses" are a different beast altogether.

I think Samsung sold it printer business to HP a few years ago. If you search for a driver you will most probably find a page on HP website.

Yes, they sold it to HP. The latest toners I got for my MD2825 have HP hologram stickers on them.

However, both MD282x series, and ML1710 are designed and produced way before the transfer. I remember seeing the Xerox printers first, thinking "Sweet", then finding the same device with a different color scheme, only under Samsung brand, and just buying it, because an extra Ethernet cable was not a problem at that time (Plus Xerox's one was unobtanium).

For the ML1710, I remember seeing the Xerox one at the university, taking an "info" page from it and saying "this looks similar to my 1710, what happens if I just use with 1710 driver?", and I was printing 35 seconds later.

Now my parents are using the 2825, and I have enough spares to let them use it for another decade at their usage volume.

For the driver thing, it's good that the 2825 supports both AirPrint and Google Cloud Print (while it lasted), and is just an IPP printer with an open PPD file. So it can be used with toaster or a server or a phone, as long as it talks AirPrint or IPP.

If you disassemble their C series printers, you should find Lexmark parts. Even the plastic enclosures are the same shape as Lexmark printers.

Interesting, so, maybe they started to work with Lexmark after Samsung went to HP? Because The 2825 had an "exact" copy in the Xerox lineup, sans the color scheme and wireless capabilities.

Or maybe they were working with different manufacturers for different series for a long time. IDK.

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

WFA stands for workflow automation.

Which F’ing Acronym?

>"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.

Partly true but I don't think they would (or should) just ax those departments. By merging those departments will be taking on more work too, so they will not need everyone but they will likely let some people go.

Even if they're purely complementary, which they're not, when one of them can only "survive"by being bought by the other, that's not survival. Let it fail, and then sell off all the parts to not yet established companies who are trying to make it in, or move into, that space. Mergers and acquisitions of established businesses puts a stranglehold on the market and should be illegal. This is the kind of bullshit that's resulted in four media conglomerates and three ISPs for a population of 300+ million.

I haven’t heard much about Broadcom before. Is this why Rally is so awful? They just rent seek on old software and don’t improve it at all? Like the people who bought Heroku?

You havent at least heard about them gutting and draining VMWare?

They also gutted and drained Symantec a few years earlier too.

Strange how much they hate money because they made it difficult to even renew the Symantec endpoint.

Just about everyone who was worth keeping left immediately.

A have a bunch of ex Symantec colleagues who put their notice in as soon as the deal closed, who were then paid very handsomely by Broadcom to stick around and keep the lights on for another year.

Rally didn't really change much before the purchase either. But the price going up by a lot is why we dropped it.

don't count on whatever work tracker you have is my advice. I've never seen a company stick with one for more, than 10 years. And now I have a lot of code comments about something weird that should not be simplifed because of some bug in the old system. And since closed bugs don't move - and even if they did they get new numbering - I have no ability to look upthat bug and ensure it doesn't break if I need to change the code.

This is why explaining commits with references to Jira or whatever is foolish - always make the source code the definitive reference, for explanations and for documentation. At least at work - maybe other things are ok for public, open development.

I remember migrating from something else to Jira a few years ago - the guy who did the migration assured me that the old task numbers would be migrated to an extra field in Jira (at my insistence - to avoid this issue).

The old numbers were migrated but of course not displayed anywhere - there as invisible metadata that I assume has since been dropped when Jira was migrated to Jira cloud.

i dont get it, how is that a .. downside?

It’s great for Lexmark, as the boat anchor of Chinese ownership was costing it government contracts.

> 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.

And based on social media, taken out.

But seriously, what’s the point of putting out this drivel. Isn’t the point of these statements to excite investors and potential big customers. Who in the publicity chain thinks these statements move anything closer to a goal?

"Oh stewardess, I speak jive." --- Barbara Billingsley

> 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.

The problem is that this bit:

> 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

applies to every single b2b company in the world right now, and thus doesn't tell you anything more than "we're a b2b company".

Someone please turn that into a the backing vocals of a techno song.

Here you go:

https://suno.com/song/627039d4-b9f4-4203-8d01-1681ef723761

https://suno.com/song/b2b320c3-793c-4331-ae1d-ea7bc1155571

It seems that they can only turn stuff into other stuff if it starts with the same letter. That space is ripe for disruption!

They help realize business outcomes.

I put that blurb into ChatGPT and asked it to translate the corporate speak into normal English:

Lexmark makes cloud-based printing and smart device technologies to help businesses achieve their goals faster. They use reliable technology and industry knowledge to help companies improve, turning information into useful insights, data into decisions, and analysis into action.

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 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.

Someone started making them new: https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/product/classic-style-f122-m...

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.

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.)

Is that, is that true? A dishwasher? Was this a regular occurrence? Did they have to turn down the water heater before hand? Did they take the keys off or leave them on and how did they dry if so?

That is true. I don't think anyone routinely did that instead of using canned air or something like that, but it was absolutely on the table for more substantial messes. Spill a can of soda into your keyboard? Run that sucker through the washer.

I have not personally done this, but google "ibm model m dishwasher" and you'll see lots of anecdotes.

You can do it today. Don’t run the heated dry and put it in with the keys facing down. Run it and take it out and leave it upside down over night on a towel. Let the connector hand down as well.

Should work perfectly in the morning.

Basically: no. The construction of the Model M disallows removing the backplate after the assembly is removed from the case. On the Model F, however, the backplate is not attached with plastic rivets, and had no rubber membrane that could trap liquids, so after the electronics were removed, it is feasible to wash it in a dishwasher. Inadvisable to say the least, if you want your PCB to remain non-warped.

I've done that a few times but not "regularly". Use the top rack, no soap, no heated dry, zip-tie a plastic bag over the connector. Afterwards let it sit on the counter face-down for a couple of days to air-dry. Comes out sparkly clean.

Most electronics are run through a 'dishwasher' as part of manufacturing. Hot water removes a lot of gunk that if left causes earay failure. chips are plastic, the board is fiberglass, the resisters are ceramic or plastic most capacters are ceramic, the conductors are metal - none of that cares about water once it dries. The only thing to worry about is impurities in the water since they can leave something conductable behind. Some capacters however cannon take water. Likewise I'm note sure if LCDs are sealed enough.

be careful of what soap you use though, dishwasher soap is too harsh. Manufactures are using deionized water and if any soap it is specific to electronics. Your house water isn't pure enough to do this often but once ever few years and you will normally get away with it.

Yes, electronics are often washed...in ultrapure water. Very briefly, and then immediately dried.

LCDs are definitely not sealed enough, many capacitors are electrolytic, and fiberglass is not impermeable to water (in fact, water-logged fiberglass is an issue for boats in areas where weather causes freeze-thaw cycles.)

Your dishwasher is full of mineral deposits, food waste particles, and likely quite a bit of mold. Getting rid of all of that would involve dissolving deposits with vinegar or citric acid, then running some lye or similarly aggressive treatment to get the mold and organic waste out. That's a lot of hassle.

You can't put "soap" in a dishwasher unless you want a giant bubble factory. So now you're looking at trying to find a specialty cleaner.

Most people's water is not nearly pure enough for the keyboard to not have issues afterward. You MIGHT get away with it if you thoroughly blasted it with compressed air and then dunked it in distilled water.

That's a huge amount of hassle.

Unless something has been spilled on the keyboard, just periodically brush out debris and then hit it with compressed air...

Many have proven you wrong with the model M. For other electronics your point stands beware that some will have no issues and some will

Can a dishwasher remove the dirt that's inside the keyboard, beneath the keycaps?

I've not run the whole keyboard through the dishwasher, but I certainly have taken off all the keycaps and washed them in boiling, soapy water. I did that to another keyboard thinking I could clean up the key funk and instead the keycaps just melted and deformed. Turns out not all keyboards are created equal. (Or use the same plastics.)

That reminds me that once as a kid I got a free Apple II+ and the main board was really dusty. So, like any enterprising kid I unconnected and unscrewed it, washed it in the sink with soap and water, and then set it in the oven at 250F to dry for a few hours. It worked great! I wonder how many modern consumer products could take that same abuse?

Electronics can handle quite a lot. I often rinse PCBs in boiling RO water (after ultrasonic cleaning with speciality detergents for flux removal) post rework. After this, drying at 125°C for a while to get those nice and crispy again. You do not want to increase the temperature above 100°C too fast, however, to avoid “popcorning” — little steam explosions due to absorbed moisture.

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.

Nearly all Model M keyboards have horrendous key rollover issues, supporting as little as 2-key rollover and only between certain sets of keys; within a set, the keyboard will only register one keypress or the keyboard will generate garbage keypresses.

It sounds like Unicomp designed the newer keyboards to have better PCB designs, but had firmware issues with key rollover on the mini (is that yours?) and may have fixed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/modelm/comments/13o0jkr/raspberry_p...

The microcontroller they had been stuck on for ages became unavailable so they started producing models with Rpi2040's, which can run QMK. If you still have it kicking around, maybe it is one of the QMK supported keyboards or they've released a fixed firmware for it?

Unfortunately the Model M and derivatives have long been eclipsed by the market. Better electronics/firmware, mechanical switches with choices in travel, force, noise level, and tactile feel... designs with lower profiles, different grid arrangement and almost every key count/layout imaginable...

Interesting, thanks for the link. I'll investigate and see if I can get it working more better.

But FWIW, I have multiple Model M classic keyboards (from 1992), and also other Unicomp full-size keyboards, and I've never had this issue with them.

I also know the story that the market has "better" options than the Model M. Maybe it's just nostalgia but I've never found anything with the same feel as a buckling spring. The Model M just feels nice to me.

For my Model Ms I've ordered and soldered PCBs from an open source project that are drop in replacements for their controller PCBs and convert them to USB A plus QMK firmware. (I'm going a bit by memory, as I had to stop the project for a while and still have to switch a couple of them, but can look that for you if you're interested)

But the keys can support a cockatiel, which makes working around them a little easier.

The real deal is the IBM model F 122 key one - which can be used to invade small countries.

https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/product/classic-style-f122-m...

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?

They may have expected typists coming over from typewriters to hammer on it for 8 hours a day, or to give them a similar feel to ease the transition and limit complaints.

This one.

You could hear a former typist from the other side of the building even on a rubber dome keyboard.

Perhaps injection molding and plastics in general weren't as advanced at the time?

It wasn't a "frame" really, it was just a single sheet of stamped steel in a curved shape.

The Model M wasn't nearly as impressive, or durable, as the Model F that preceded it and which was included with the IBM PC. Those keyboards had metal housings, unlike the plastic housings of the Model M.

IBM was a typewriter company and their keyboards reflected that for quite awhile - keys you could “tell” you pressed, machines that could take a beating.

Also most keyboards from the era were “similar” since the switches were somewhat of a standard. It wasn’t until the PC market took off and went nuts that cost cutting and other developments began - especially in the portable/laptop area.

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.

a couple years ago they redid their tooling. They were getting bad because the factory was worn out. Reportably things are much better now.

might want to check out the Daskeyboard. Modern NKRO but built in the extremely rugged style.

I used to work at Lexmark in the same lab as the son of Neil Muyskens, who founded Unicomp.

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.

They're not so great if you have an open office. You can hear the person with the Model M clattering away from across the room.

That's a feature, not a bug. The problem here isn't the Model M (or any clicky keyboard), the problem is the open office.

For the user, this is a bug. Anyone in the office can set up a (directional) microphone and recover what they are typing.[1] Not sure how well you could pick up passphrases, but seems like private messages wouldn't stay private.

The user might not have the power to do anything about the open office, but most likely has the power to switch keyboards to something less audible.

[1] https://charleslabs.fr/en/project-Breaking+Passwords+with+a+...

Why should the user care? No corporate employee is worried about other employees figuring out their passwords. If that happens, the employer has bad security, and they'll suffer the consequences anyway. Why should the user put up with a crappy keyboard for the company's sake, unless the company is forcing them to? What an absurd take.

Former Lexmarker here; I bought a Unicomp keyboard to compliment my beastly Model M that I've used on every single computer I've owned. The Unicomp is good but I keep coming back to the IBM M. It's fun to have something physical that ties my childhood, job, and employment together like that. I like the fact that I can use a piece of electronic equipment on a daily basis and it still hasn't died yet.

As another commenter said, there are more modern keyboards available but the feel (and yes the nostalgia) of the M is yet to be beat in my mind for daily use. Although a few of the current ones come close...

The Unicomps are nice and a step up from cheap keyboards, but they’re no model M.

I’m hearing that Lexmark/Unicomp keyboards were/are a cost cutting project compared to original Model F. Interestingly there is a company that resurrected true, pre cost cutting, model F: https://www.modelfkeyboards.com

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.

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!?

>They did not need more than basic maintenance.

The other guy was probably working on ones that didn't get the basic maintenance. People always skimp on preventative care and then are surprised when things break.

When I worked in a computer lab 20ish years ago, being consistent about which side of the paper we loaded when we loaded paper made a huge difference. They are always stacked on the pallet the same way and had a little indicator on the flap of the wrapper around the ream that pointed down.

I'm always surprised when schools want people to donate reams of paper, instead of just ordering a pallet of paper, swapping between a bunch of different weights and qualities is going to cause more way more costs in repairs than just ordering paper by the pallet.

one of the main ones with the tray printers is dusty rollers . the rubber rollers that roll the paper out of the tray will get dirty and the paper will slip and cause jams or miss printing. of course theirs no error code for dirty rollers so the printer would say all kinds of shit because it would end up being a paper jam. we also used labels in the pharmacy and those would peel off and end up stuck all over the inside of the printer, good times haha.

Schools still want people to donate paper? My local school system got rid of most printers/copiers years ago and it takes administration approval to print something on the few that remain. My daughter is a senior and I don’t think she has brought home a piece of paper from school since 5th grade.

The grade schools do, high schools barely seem to use paper.

Grade schools use tons of it unless they buy large amounts of workbooks each year. Cheaper for them to get free paper and photocopy.

The grade schools around here don’t. It takes permission from a vice principal to print or copy anything. Mostly the printers/copiers are for administrative need only. All 2nd - 12th graders have school issued Chromebooks which go to and from school with them. Kindergarten and 1st grade have classroom issued Chromebooks which they use. All worksheets/workbooks are electronic.

Elimination of most printers and restrictions on the use of remaining ones was one of the cost saving measures put in place to offset the cost of issuing Chromebooks system wide. Others include getting rid of physical text books and elimination of most classroom computers. Classroom computers remain when needed for specific curriculum. For instance my daughter”s architectural drawing classes had computers for running Autocad and Revit.

in the US we just generally underfund schools. Asking parents to donate supplies is not that normal elsewhere for reasons like these.

I had a client who had a T640tn with a forms card that did somewhere around 1000 pages a day every day, pretty much trouble free.

It was in a pretty dusty environment too, in the weighbridge office at a fruit juice plant.

Our office printer (6 years) has much fewer pages. It works fine for single-sided printing. For double-sided printing the first 20 or so pages work fine. After that nearly every back page will end up in a paper jam, always same position, no visible reason. Until the next day (or maybe a shorter wait is enough, haven't really tried). Very annoying...

PC Load Letter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER

PC Load Letter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok

PC load A4 you mean?

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.

I use black electrical tape for those ever-more-common nuisances.

Painting the printer in Vantablack is also an acceptable answer.

That might be the one thing more toxic than toner powder particles.

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...

https://www.lightdims.com/

You can get a lot of toys but if your or your significant others' cosmetic habits include black nail polish why not use it?

You can’t remove the nail polish (without likely damaging the base surface) when you want to sell or gift the device to someone else, and it doesn’t look good on non-black devices. (Even on black devices you might not like its glossiness.) Black nail polish also completely blacks out the light, whereas one might only want to reduce the brightness (which the product I linked to supports).

I don’t see myself selling a printer; most likely bring it to recycling when it dies in 10 years.

As for gifting, if they object to my aesthetic choices that can always wait for someone else to gift them one.

Well, you asked for reasons. They may not apply to you specifically.

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).

See, that's what I'm avoiding with IPP Everywhere[1]: no configuration required.

It just magically shows up instantly as a printer on Linux. It's the best printing experience I've ever had.

[1]: https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html

I may be misunderstanding, but it seems to me that you're talking about a printer that is already connected to the local network? But in my case, the software was needed to connect the printer to the wifi.

I configured the internal IP via the printer's control panel actually.

But of course, you need a printer with a control panel on it.

I got the cheapest b&w laser (i print so little that inkjet is out of the question) all in one that had ethernet (B225). It has a tiny display and some buttons. You can set it up and use it like a copy machine at the least from it.

Both Lexmark and Xerox have Mopria-certified printers. Windows 11 24H2 added Mopria support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mopria_Alliance

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.

Xerox still manufactures a lot of toner. It’s where all the money is in the market. They have a massive plant making EA toner and then a packing plant next door in Webster, NY USA at the main campus.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark

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!

This was the pre-Gerstner era of the “Baby Blues”: Lexmark, AdStar, Pennant, Eduquest, Advantis/ISSC, and some others I’ve forgotten. In the end IBM spun off Lexmark, Federal Systems (to Loral), AdStar never spun out but was the division sold to Hitachi. Lexmark was “small” printers and keyboards, Pennant was the room sized beasts. Advantis became IBM Global Network, sold to AT&T in 2000.

The IBM / Lexmark relationship persisted for years after this. IBM Thinkpads would be cross-sold with promos for Lexmark printers.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990423063310/http://www.direct...

And in a few years, IBM will buy Xerox and own Lexmark again.

I didn’t know these brands still existed. The title felt like “East India Company to acquire Silk Road”.

Especially among drug dealers game recognize game.

This is unfortunate for Lexmark employees.

Lexmark is unfortunate for Lexmark employees. Knew a guy who worked there - constant layoffs and train-your-replacement offshoring, nearly every year. It's a shell of what it was 20 years ago, but that's probably to be expected for a printer company.

Sounds like Xerox. I got out after 20+ years with the last of the good voluntary layoff packages. The ones that hung on got a lot less than I did.

Is there any printer company that is not 30+ years old? What is stopping a start-up from making a printer people actually like?

People speak highly of Brother printers and I've been happy with mine. On top of it, lots of people don't really print anything day to day.

I really liked my last Brother printer before I had to sell it in a move.

However, Brother is anything but new; it was started in 1908.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Industries

Print is dying. It took a while to realize the "paperless office" and we aren't quite there yet, but in my office, the amount of stuff people print has really dropped in the past decade. Stores offer email or text message receipts, doctor's offices have you fill out forms online.

Printers are not a growth market, so not very attractive to a start-up.

Even back in the last decade, the only thing I ever printed in the office was return labels to slap on a package.

Printers are a shrinking market.

And it's dominated by players who (a) make a good product, (b) produce very diverse lines of printers (such as equipment that prints on fabric - not a dying industry at all, as people continue to desire to wear clothes with designs printed on them), and (c) make other things similar to printers, like sewing machines.

Examples of these players would be Epson (who also make gigantic direct-to-fabric printers) and Brother (who still make sewing machines and popular label printers to print labels to stick on packages). HP and Lexmark are not leaders in the aforementioned spaces - at all.

Consumer and small-office print is declining, so there is not enough money to be made making non-shit printers from scratch.

Making shit printers (those that are sold below cost with the profits recouped from cartridge sales and other user-hostile measures) is the only thing keeping the market afloat.

However, that segment of the market is already captured by the existing manufacturers (which have the existing patents and supply/manufacturing chain - aka economies of scale) that a newcomer would never be able to enter said market profitably.

Print is simply dying. Heck, even at airports, it used to be a requirement that you'd have your ticket/itinerary printed but now most officials will accept your phone receipts.

this headline feels like i'm in 1996 again

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/

1. To allow the merger, Congress imposed some pretty onerous restrictions on any collaboration between the two companies. There is a Lexmark board of former US generals who are supervising the divison. 2. Nine star is the owner, but a lot of the preferred equity used to fund the deal came from PAG, an asian private equity firm. Their investment accrues at a pretty high interest rate and eats into Ninestar’s returns. 3. The whole thesis was that Ninestar would be able to control the amount of counterfeit ink for Lexmark printers. But with another Trump term, and lack of ability to integrate the two, the thesis is broken.

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.)

Now I want to know why you left education for tech! :)

I also wish to subscribe to this thread.

Check my sibling comment, and thanks for your interest!

The short story is that teaching is, by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. It was also extremely rewarding, and I'm very grateful I did it. But it was not going to be sustainable for me. I journaled my experience here: https://acjay.com/a-former-teachers-story/

In my second and final year of teaching, I knew I couldn't go back, so I decided to go back to grad school for a second masters, in Music Technology, at NYY. I felt it would buy me some time to figure out my life, while easing me back into tech and being fun. I cofounded a startup when I was there, which failed, but introduced me to the NYC tech scene in the process.

I worked on the laser printers in the early 2000s when they transitioned to Linux for the OS. They were hiring Linux nerds and I fit the bill. It was a fun place for a while, but the IBM legacy was an albatross. I left for Google and didn't look back.

I wasn’t even aware Xerox was still around..

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.

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.

>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.

[1] https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/

> 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'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.

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 take it you haven't had Brother printers

My SO also loves her Brother sewing machine.

And I recently bought myself a Brother label maker, which again is proving excellent.

I've come to the conclusion that if it's got moving parts, and Brother makes it, I'll have the Brother one thanks.

Actually I have. My current (DCP 1610-W) is better than the average but it still drops its network connection, or gets upset during a print, or stops talking to the Android app. Fine, but hardly excellent.

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.

Fortune 500 seems irrelevant these days.

Xerox market cap being $1B while their revenue is $7B means investors are pricing quite a bit of downsizing in their future.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XRX/xerox-holdings...

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-...

Yep - I bought a Xerox colour laser printer a few years back (C405) and it's legit one of the best printers I've ever had, and runs circles around the last colour laser printer I had (a Canon).

Just works on any computer that sees it on the network, print quality is fantastic, never jams, just all around brilliant. It's also got a warranty that extends every year that you buy Geniune Xerox toner. An onsite parts and labour warranty at that.

Apparently it may already be a Lexmark. I have a C315 and I am super happy with it. They offered cheap extra paper trays, too.

Is this comparable to when two extremely old widowers decide be roommates and live out their remaining days?

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?

Printers maintain a page counter.

Laser printers print a status page that describes most of their settings, how many toners you've changed and also includes the total page count.

Wonder why it happened? anyone know the back story?

Maybe the both had a similar AI strategy

And the AIs decided they should merge.

TIL both Xerox and Lexmark still exist. I haven't heard those names for a couple of decades.

oh no

...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.

This may be devastating for the small city of Lexington, Kentucky. Seems like this was one of the only major businesses in the area.

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.”

The same is true of Rochester, NY, where Xerox came out of. I went to school there. In the old days the university fed into local employers (Xerox, Kodak), but now it's a college town where the university and its med school hospital is a big employer but there is huge wealth disparity, and not a lot of opportunity for the large population that is less educated and not affiliated with the school. Not a great situation.

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 mean I'm sure they do, but they also offers Cobol, GroupWise and a fax solution, so I... I don't know where to start.

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)

shrugs

Most of the time, all you need is Walmart and Meijer, and you can also find those in Richmond, along with a decent number of other big-box stores and clothing stores and stuff. But yeah, Lexington is definitely a popular shopping destination.

Back when my grandparents lived in Richmond, we would go to Lexington for the mall (not the green roof one, the real one), because Richmond's mall was a decaying husk even in the 1990s, before Walmart moved out next to it, Sears went under, etc. I was surprised to see that it is still open, but I digress.

For context, Walmart employs about as many people in Lexington's three superstores and one neighborhood market as Lexmark does. Losing 2k jobs in a city of 320k people would not be catastrophic. And most of those jobs probably don't overlap with Xerox's business anyway, so I wouldn't expect that to happen.

> 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.

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.

Toyota just announced a massive paint facility expansion so they're not going anywhere.

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.

I worked there for a very short stint. They hired me to write a programming language to help streamline the process of building installers. But I ended up being tasked with helping get Vista support out the door. I think I was there for less than 2 months. It’s the second-shortest stint in my career. It was a shadow of its former self by then, but it was really interesting to walk the vast manufacturing floors.

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

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.

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