ARTHUR D. LITTLE
As a result of this report, IBM did not acquire the Xerox technology. Xerox went on to place 600,000 units of the machine that Arthur D. Little assessed would be only 5,000. Until IBM pulled out of their Partnership with Microsoft for the development of Windows, the failure to deploy the Xerox process was the largest mistake they had made. It shows that even the best of companies make large errors.
Arthur D. Little is an international management consulting firm originally headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and formally incorporated by that name in 1909 by Arthur Dehon Little, an MIT chemist who had discovered acetate. Arthur D. Little pioneered the concept of contracted professional services. The company played key roles in the development of business strategy, operations research, the word processor, the first synthetic penicillin, LexisNexis, SABRE and NASDAQ. Today the company is a multi-national management consulting firm operating as a partnership.
