[mnehring]

Xerox’s failure to patent all that can be considered one of the biggest business blunders of all time.

[WhiskeyX]

Xerox licensed and sold its patents to companies such as Apple, after making limited efforts to manufacture and market its own products based upon those patents. Xerox in the late Seventies and early Eighties judged the market presence of IBM mainframe computer monopoly to be too formidable of an obstacle in the office automation market for the corporate market was targeting. IT management in the corporations were almost uniformly hostile to the introduction of the early microcomputers and personal computers, because they were trained to rely upon mainframe computers and networks. A vice president of Information Technology went so far as to chastise the corporate managers for requesting the purchase of early microcomputers and the first IBM personal computers by saying they were a waste of the corporate budget and would never amount to anything of value to the corporation. Consequently, our Retail Markets Division of Xerox found the corporate IT shops to have virtually closed doors for anything other than the occasional IBM personal computers. This market environment took a number of years to change after the Xerox patents were already aged and approaching expiration, and Xerox had already profited to a lesser extent through licensing and sales of the patents.

[j_tull]

Xerox’s failure to patent all that can be considered one of the biggest business blunders of all time.

The biggest miss of all was failing to patent the Ethernet networking protocol.