I’ve been wasting the last ten or fifteen minutes on Twitter while I’m rolling over in my head an article from the business section of the New York Times I just read. After the story just wouldn’t leave my mind as I tried to distract myself, I figured that the story is worthy of comment, even if the whole thing is all about a silly logo.
The whole thing is about Xerox (or should I say xerox?), and that they’ve re-branded their company today to reflect … how did they put it? Oh right: “engaging, approachable, 
technologically savvy and eager to lead in the 21st century.” Perhaps I’m too cynical, or just far too media savvy for my own good, but the logo says to me exactly what they did: they hired Interbrand to make them look like a Web 2.0 company.
I’m sure the advertising and PR blogs are going to be hashing this stuff out for the next few weeks about what this thing means, but it looks to me like Xerox is just putting a brand new face on the same old company. Don’t get me wrong, Xerox is a company with a rich technological history, and is worthy of respect for a lot of the R&D and advancements they’ve put forth. Aside from providing commodity services in the form of printers, though, what are they contributing these days to the bleeding edges of the technology world? Does anything spring to mind?
I didn’t think so. They have a few products listed in their software download section, and this quote from the Times article seems to allude to something that sounds sort of Web 2.0ish: “[The company] has introduced 100 new products in the last three years. But it doesn’t want the Xerox name to conjure them up, either, given that services — like managing a company’s document flow — are a pretty fast-growing part of the product mix, too.”
Being part of the conversation and working to simplify daily life would both be moves that would go quite far for Xerox to shed the image of being “formal, and somewhat stodgy.” That would mean putting the blogs out in front, and actually covering a topic that would be relevant to the community that they serve, as opposed to the developers that work for the company. The latest blog post of substance in Xerox’s hidden blog section was entitled ODF, OOXML,… and UOF and the contents of the post were similarly cryptic.
Granted, if there’s an authority somewhere on the web for finding arcane knowledge about document formats, a Xerox blog might be it. On the other hand, I’ve always contended that participating in the conversation, as seen at Microsoft and Southwest Airlines blogs, is always going to be far more of a successful marketing move than simply chronicling the various inane details of what the programming team is working on this week.
For all I know, though, there may be a significant amount of that going on over at Xerox, but because no one told them that blogging is a system used to manage content, they’re instead using a crippled display system to hide the content on an unused portion deep within the corporate site.
This isn’t meant to be a hit piece on Xerox. It is, though, meant to be a bit of a wake up call. You can’t simply spend millions on a re-branding effort and extreme sports sponsorships in today’s world and expect everyone to suddenly start re-thinking your company. You change minds by actually allowing yours to be changed.
In other words, if Xerox wants to be thought of as less stodgy, perhaps they should act less stodgy.
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