Hewlett-Packard laid off 14,500 employees yesterday. Today Kodak laid off 15,000, which means that company has laid off 25,000 people in the last couple of years! Xerox, well, I don’t know the figures yet. Is Xerox still in business? Does anyone still buy copiers?
At a restaurant where I was eating dinner the other night the bartender said he used to work at Xerox. Nice place, he said. Their corporate culture was humane, welcoming. He also said they just didn’t see the PC coming. In fact, they had developed early prototype versions of the mouse, the Ethernet and other bits and bobs that we think of as commonplace now — this was way back — but it was others who eventually introduced these things to the public. Xerox boldly stuck with their copiers, though they branched out to computer printers, which are somewhat technically related.
Interesting that both Kodak and Xerox are headquartered in Rochester, a medium-sized town with a fast-flowing river, useful for power and disposing of all those nasty photo chemicals. Other than that it’s somewhat isolated, not a big rail hub or port… so what made these once giant almost monopolies emerge there? They were so ubiquitous that their company names almost replaced the generic name for a copier or a camera — the way the word Kleenex sort of replaced facial tissue.
The Eastman House in Rochester has just partnered with the ICP here in NY to put lots and lots of pix on line, hundreds of thousands. Eastman house has the largest collection of pix from the dawn of photography up until the contemporary era, after which other institutions then took the lead. So this seems like a wonderful timely idea. It’s cheaper than brick and mortar institutions and will I imagine inspire folks who’ve never seen a lot of the stuff before. Curators, photographers, scholars and plain folks.
