Lessons from an Earlier AIIM Show
As I head out to Boston for the AIIM / On Demand show, my thoughts go back 13 years to when I participated in the first Xerox visit to the AIIM show. Come to think of it, that is probably because I still have the black and yellow “show shirt” hanging in my closet – despite regular and frequent protests and threats from my wife to get rid of it.
In 1994, Xerox set up a major event at the Jacob K. Javits Center that coincided with the AIIM show. Javits was so large that it swallowed both events and without collisions, though it made it easier for the press to cover both events. The Xerox event, code named Typhoon, was to announce a new solutions strategy, moving from feeds and speeds to vertically integrated solutions featuring Xerox hardware and software aligned by industry segment. The seven solutions areas were entered through a dark tunnel dramatically enhanced by smoke and flashing lights. The evening before the show opened, the executive in charge of the show gathered all his Xerox folks together in the dramatic center of the booth for a final pep talk and to share his vision. It was clear to me that half of the people present probably had no idea what he was talking about.
But tucked away on the side of a “future technology” exhibit was a small, innocuous unmarked console printer which would periodically spit out full color documents at 40 ppm. And standing beside it, we were showing matched Xerographic and offset prints and asking the customers if they could tell them apart. We were showing about 20 different technologies in the “future suite,” but the big take away was that toner-based color, which was then available only in copiers and for office documents, was a viable printing technology for these analysts and lead customers.
As to the success of the solutions thrust on this event, well all I can say is that one of the advantages of being ahead of the pack is that you can get a few tries before the pack catches up. You can see from Tom Wetjen’s blog entry of April 9 that Xerox will be emphasizing “show me,” demonstrating real applications – what I think we were trying to do in 1994. And this time, all the Xerox people in the booth get it. I believe the past is a good guide to the future – it is just hard to find the clues in the clutter. So I will try to keep an open mind as I go around the show, looking for something that could become as big as our production color probe of 1994.
Just to add another walk down memory lane to this year’s event, the Xerox booth is number 914 – the model number of our first office copier and one of the most disruptive and significant products of the last century. Talk about setting expectations!
Peter Crean
Senior Fellow, Xerox Innovation Group
Xerox