"xerox" is a word that is used in written English
It is a verb meaning to copy with a Xerox machine - usually used in the past tense (e.g. "I xeroxed the document"). Example sentence: I xeroxed the invoice and handed it to my boss.
They do not pay up for fraud, and although the Xerox executives have (as the convenient wording always goes in such cases) neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing, the insurers will argue with some justification that this is mere semantics.
Xerox's bylaws indemnify its executives for all such charges, so the company will be paying Mr Allaire's $7.6m, as well as the $11.8m that the SEC has demanded from five other Xerox executives.
Xerox had already settled SEC charges by paying a $10m fine, and has seen several senior executives quit.
Paul Allaire, who successfully ran Xerox during the 1990s, lasted only 15 months the second time around.
At Xerox, which overstated its profits by $1.4 billion, Barry Romeril's retirement as CFO in December has not spared him an SEC letter asking why he should not be charged with fraud.Why are so many CFOs in trouble?
EDS, a services giant, brought in Jim Daley, a grandfather who had been one of the top team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a large accounting firm, in 1999; Xerox, without a CFO since December, hired 59-year-old Lawrence Zimmerman; in May, Ford brought 67-year-old Allan Gilmour out of retirement.Another option is to bring in a foreigner.
Microsoft is a rare exception, one of the few big companies still spending big bucks on employing top scientists in the way pioneered by firms such as AT&T (with its Bell Laboratories and Xeroxx (with its Palo Alto Research Centre, the legendary PARC .This will prove to be a wise investment by Microsoft only if its scientists' output can be turned into profitable products or services.
Giving the personal computer a "graphical user interface" (GUI or "gooey") such as Windows was Apple's idea which, in turn, was inspired by work done at Xerox PARC.
For good measure, MSR was located on the firm's campus in Redmond and not, like Xerox PARC, 3,000 miles from corporate headquarters.That said, the founders had no intention of creating a traditional industrial research laboratory in which scientists toil behind closed doors.
"The corporate research labs of the old days are really not going to be the basis of what is new," says John Seely Brown, the director of Xerox PARC for over a decade until 2000.
Only a few big firms today spent as much on basic research as companies such as Xerox and AT&T BellLabsbs) did in the 1960s and 1970s.
