I’ve been in business long enough to remember the first fax machine arriving in the office.
That was in 1983.
It was a marvel – after we plugged it in, we all stood around it, wondering what to do with it :-)))
As I recall, it was made by Samsung.
I went on to buy several fax machines over the coming decade – they became quite a thing.
Interesting, they were all from Japanese manufacturers.
Not one was made by Xerox Corporation even though it was Xerox that had led the way (for decades!) in developing fax technology.
Xerox didn’t capitalize on their technological leadership because they didn’t believe there was a mass market for fax machines, as ‘economically’ it didn’t make sense.
Peter Drucker summarized that if you’d carried out market research at the time and asked people:
‘Would you buy a telephone accessory that costs upwards of $1,500 and enables you to send, for $1 a page, the same letter the post office delivers for 25 cents?’ …
People would reasonably say ‘NO!’.
However, the Japanese looked beyond the cost of using fax machines and came to a different conclusion.
They focused on whether there were people who valued speed over cost and determined that there would be a market for that benefit.
So, they pretty much stole the business from Xerox.
Now, as an aside, you may be wondering …
Why did we have a very expensive fax machine in the office when we didn’t know what to do with it?
Well, that will be the subject of another Smart CEO Question, but the short answer is …
Because a marketing savvy supplier figured that if they paid to install a fax machine in our office they’d get more of our business.
And they did.
A lot more.