Xerox - whoops, The Document Company!

As far as I am concerned, Xerox is an eminently suitable name for a company. The name is easily recognizable, well-respected, and (presumably) free from cross-cultural problems.

However, the corporate strategy experts at Xerox thought that it wasn't good enough, so in about 1994, with the advice of Landor Associates, they changed the name to The Document Company Xerox. (Or perhaps they just recommended adding a tag line.) In French, the line is Les Gens de Documents - literally, the gentlemen of documents.

Web pages at the Xerox site explain that a videotape is actually just another form of document. Here's the quote, from What is the document?

The hard copy manuscript of a Mozart Symphony sitting in a Salzburg Museum is a document. A CD of the Vienna Philharmonic playing that symphony is an audio document with the added information of the conductors [sic] interpretation. A video of the performance is yet another document.

I don't agree. Xerox seems to be arguing for device-independent multimedia, across a pretty wide range (sheet music, digital audio, video). As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as good multimedia. Any good presentation is necessarily optimized for the presentation medium.

Charles - Preparing to RIP on a DocuTech
1999-01-20