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Xerox nevertheless has gamely plunged ahead. In 1969 it paid stock worth nearly $1 billion in order to acquire Scientific Data Systems, a maker of small and medium computers, which has proceeded to lose $100 million under Xerox's ownership. Undaunted, Xerox five months ago paid another $29 million in stock to buy Diablo Systems, a computer disc-drive manufacturer. Xerox has won barely 1% of the world market for U.S. computers, compared with IBM's two-thirds, and the computer operation will gobble up $26 million in Xerox research and development funds this year alone.
The strain has not yet told on Xerox's profits, which rose 18% above the 1971 period in this year's first six months, but Chairman C. Peter McColough recently warned securities analysts that profit gains in the second half will not be quite so large as Wall Street had been expecting. McColough frankly concedes: "We are not happy about what we have to do, but the simple truth is that we have no choice. If we do not do it [develop a computer-copier system], IBM will, and then we will be nothing more than a company that makes duplicating machines for tiny little offices and businesses."
IBM has done better at making copiers. Though it has only one model and has marketed that for only about two years, IBM is believed already to be No. 3 in the field, behind Xerox and 3M. (Its gains, however, seem to have come at the expense of such concerns as 3M, Addressograph Multigraph, SCM, Sperry Rand and Dennison, rather than Xerox, which retains three-fourths of the global copier market.)
IBM Chairman T. Vincent Learson will not talk about the company's copier program, but IBM's chief problem in getting a computer-copier system on the market seems to be neither financial nor technical but legal. Xerox has built a fence of patents and copyrights around its duplicating technology, and already is suing IBM for alleged patent infringement. Conceivably it can tie IBM in legal knots until its own technicians perfect a computer-copier system—though no one can be too sure who remembers the long line of corporate giants that have lost competitive battles with IBM. In any case, both the legal contest and the research race probably will last for years, during which executives and stockholders of both companies will have ample reason to chew on their nails.