They’re separate companies now, but MGM is known for making feature films and operating about half the casinos on the Vegas Strip.
Don’t they make guitars as well?
It took them that long to decide cars weren’t just a fad.
Yes, Yamaha makes very nice guitars. If I want a new (to me) acoustic guitar, I go looking in pawn shops for broken ones made by them. Fixed, they’re almost always stellar.
GE has engaged in a lot of divesting of prior businesses over the years, including selling off their appliance business, once a pillar of their dominance. But at various points in their history since their founding in 1892, they were arguably the most diversified company in the world, involved in (quoting Wikipedia) “aerospace, transportation, energy, healthcare, lighting, locomotives, appliances, and finance.” They seemed to be involved in pretty much everything, even if it had little or nothing to do with electricity. It even owned the NBC television network for a while through its purchase of RCA. By 2024 GE had been spun off into three distinct and separate companies and was no longer a mega-conglomerate.
Most of those companies were cameras first, then moved into photocopiers, then later printers / MFPs. Optics/Lenses were part of the connection between cameras and copiers, as well as the manufacturing experience you mentione..
The mention of copiers and printers reminds me of a story I’ve told before, which I still find remarkable, and it also has a personal connection because I’ve been to the place in question and my older brother worked there for a time.
Back in the late 60s, Xerox had enjoyed tremendous success from their patented copier technology, and at the urging of their chief scientist, Jack Goldman, made the decision to invest in an advanced research facility. The idea was that wonders might come out of it that would enable the company to further prosper. It was built in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley, and became known as the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or simply Xerox PARC.
What did the researchers at PARC invent? Among many other things, the concept of the personal computer (the Xerox Alto), the idea of a windows-based user interface, the local area network (Ethernet), laser printers, the client-server model, and much else. Even an early version of a laptop computer.
IOW, the Xerox Corporation had in the palm of their hand virtually the entirety of everything we use today in the world of personal computers. They could have gone from being a copier maker to absolute dominance in the world of PCs and networking.
And what did they do with this awesome ownership of amazing new technology?
Absolutely nothing. It was the most abysmal failure of corporate vision that I have ever witnessed.
Meanwhile some of the researchers at PARC went on to found their own very successful companies, like Adobe and 3Com (the latter later acquired by HP) while Xerox executives sat around with their thumbs up their ass.
A high-school friend of my dad’s ended up working at PARC. He invited us to visit in around 1981. We were absolutely amazed by the Star.
We were also absolutely amazed that you needed at least three of them in a network in order for them to function, at $15k a piece (around $60k today). I believe the laser printer (not called that, then) was also required, at a similar price tag.
Everyone we met was extremely frustrated that Xerox wouldn’t market what they’d done. When other Silicon Valley companies made clear they wanted to sell these ideas, a huge number of PARC researchers jumped ship. Steve Jobs didn’t steal anything. Xerox gave/drove the technology and the people away.
Did Apple hire many employees from Xerox? I mean, I still think Jobs stole some of their ideas, but did he also steal manpower?
I don’t know, but that was never a major part of the story about Jobs and Gates both stealing the “windows” paradigm idea from Xerox PARC.
I’m old enough to remember attending a conference where the concept was described. The speaker (I have no idea who he was affiliated with) asked the audience rhetorically how they dealt with their everyday tasks – did they have a scrolling wall of text in front of their faces, or did they have papers of all kinds scattered around the top of their desk, which they referred to as needed? This was the genesis of the windows paradigm, the origin of the figurative term “desktop”, and it came from Xerox PARC.
I have no idea about numbers, but even Alan Kay ended up at Apple
Is it stealing if you leave your belongings out on the sidewalk with a sign saying “I don’t want any of this”?
I don’t think the situation with Xerox is unique. For another example, someone at Kodak invented the digital camera but their entire business model was based on sales of film and developing chemicals so this wasn’t something they were easily able to pursue. Meanwhile, Xerox was almost entirely about photocopiers at the time.
PARC was just so half-assed, though. It’s one thing to say “We’re a copier company, and we’re going to stick with copiers”. It’s another thing to say “We’re a technology company, so we’re going to fund a top-notch research campus, to come up with the Next Big Thing that we’re going to expand into”. Either one of those makes sense as a business strategy.
But why fund the top-notch research campus, if you don’t intend to use any of the many ideas they come up with?
Ah… I hadn’t really considered the copier angle. That makes more sense now.
Well, I think it was more of one of those situations where they deliberately didn’t pursue it for a long while, then they did, but never managed to be terribly successful at it. Largely because they didn’t realize that with the cameras/film model, they still made the majority of their money on film/chemicals, while in the camera space, they were going to not only have to make all their money on that, they were going to have to compete with all the usual suspects, PLUS anyone who could slap a CCD in a plastic box along with a few other commonly available electronic components.
I actually wrote a somewhat prophetic graduate business school paper in 2003 about how camera companies had a rude awakening coming/happening, because anyone could buy the components and integrate them into just about any digital device, and how this lowered the barriers to entry into the camera market, and it also expanded what could be considered a “camera”. I didn’t actually predict the advent of the smartphone and the absolute murdering of the consumer digital camera market that followed, but I did predict the broad pattern.
In a larger sense, it just points out the necessity for companies to constantly be moving forward and innovating; having a secure market position and excellence at it is only good for so long in most industries, with services and stuff like food being the primary exceptions.
Inland was a division of General Motors, and was around from 1923 to 1989. They manufactured all kinds of things for automobiles. During WWII they built M1 carbines.
Yes, a very similar situation. I’d bet Xerox executives saw it all as technology to make paper a thing of the past. Which it very much was.
In fact the famed NBC three-note motif is G-E-C, (Sol - Mi - Do) which stands for General Electric Corporation.
I’ve read that Singer was very good at making machines with tight tolerances which made it easy for them to switch over to manufacturing handguns. Two disparate products, so they certainly qualify as an example in this thread, but the manfuacturing process for one was directly applicable for the other. It’s just most of us wouldn’t think a sewing machine company would make excellent firearms.
The reasons Xerox didn’t capitalize on the work out of PARC have been the subject of many studies. It pretty much boils down to a lack of imagination – Xerox executives didn’t know what to do with it and were extremely risk-averse about potentially harming their primary revenue stream. In order to really benefit from all the innovation at PARC, Xerox would have had to fundamentally transform their culture.
They did try to adapt some of the tech into the Xerox Star workstation, but they didn’t sufficiently innovate their business model so ended up with a product that was grossly overpriced and didn’t fit into any larger strategy. There was also a big cultural disconnect (and geographic separation) between the Xerox “suits” on the east coast and the scientists in Palo Alto.
A lot of these issues weren’t unique to Xerox but continue to be obstacles to innovation at many large companies, which suffer from inertia and risk aversion.
No one has mentioned yet the Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Co.