Xerox Corporation /ˈzɪərɒks/ (also known as Xerox, stylized as xerox since 2008, and previously as XEROX from 1960 to 2008) is an American global corporation that sells document solutions and services, and document technology products in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (moved from Stamford, Connecticut in October 2007), though its largest population of employees is based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.
On December 31, 2016, Xerox separated its business process service operations into a new publicly traded company, Conduent. Xerox focuses on its document technology and document outsourcing business, and continues to trade on the NYSE.
Researchers at Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center invented several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse and desktop computing. These concepts were frowned upon by the then board of directors, who ordered the Xerox engineers to share them with Apple technicians. The concepts were adopted by Apple and, later, Microsoft. With the help of these innovations, Apple and Microsoft came to dominate the personal computing revolution of the 1980s, whereas Xerox was not a major player.