Also, it's the exact same generic story people tell about, say, Kodak.

Probably you, and most people on HN haven't been paying attention to them in a long time, but what happened in the last 15 years or so, is that they decided to diversify out from copiers into services.

It sounds vaguely plausible, people obviously deal with documents mostly on computers and not paper these days, so why can't they help with that?

Eventually they acquired a fairly big, but not a household name, outsourcing company called ACS. I used to wonder why Google couldn't do the same stuff, but they did in fact outsource, probably because it was the data processing equivalent of cleaning toilets.

But then a notorious corporate raider, aka Carl Icahn, came in and forced management to break up the company in the name of shareholder value, isolating the copiers in one business, and the document services in another, basically ACS under a new name.

Who's right? Diversify or get back to basics? It seems sometimes it's just random. You can come up with platitudes justifying either.

This may kind of seem like normal corporate America, but it just seems a bit uncharitable to call the CEO an idiot when you look at how the people running GameStop or whatever have had things a bit easier with billions being thrown at them.