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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>"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.

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?

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

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?

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.

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