Xerox's lab was years ahead. What is Xerox worth now?
On October 23, 2026, Xerox Holdings was worth about $336 million on the stock market. That same day Apple was worth about $5.07 trillion, roughly 15,000 times more, and Microsoft about $3.89 trillion, all three values computed from the Nasdaq closing price and the shares outstanding on each company's latest SEC filing.
The question starts with a lab. Xerox created the Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in 1970. In 1973 PARC designed the Alto, a computer that combined a mouse, networking and software with movable windows and icons, a graphical user interface. The same year PARC created Ethernet, a way to link computers together, and the lab also developed laser printing. The Computer History Museum notes that the Alto's overlapping windows remain graphical standards today.
The mouse itself was not a PARC invention. It came from Douglas Engelbart's lab at SRI, where Bill English built the first prototype in 1964. SRI showed it in public in December 1968, along with multiple windows on one screen, and the patent was issued in 1970. PARC put the mouse on the Alto. In December 1979 Apple engineers and CEO Steve Jobs visited PARC, and the Computer History Museum says the Alto influenced Apple's Lisa and Macintosh. The Macintosh came out in 1984, and Microsoft's Windows 1.0 followed in November 1985 as a graphical interface for MS-DOS.
The market values in the opening are simple products: the official closing price on October 23, 2026 times the number of shares on the cover of each company's most recent filing. Xerox closed at $2.56 that day, down from $2.79 the day before, across about 131 million shares. Apple's 14.6 billion shares at $347.725 and Microsoft's 7.4 billion shares at $524.51 put both companies in the trillions, which is why Xerox appears as a sliver on the same axis.
A common reading of the story is that Xerox never profited from its lab. The Computer History Museum says otherwise: of PARC's inventions, some generated billions of dollars in sales for Xerox. The museum does not say which ones. Xerox's own revenue, in dollar terms and not adjusted for inflation, tells a separate story. It was about $19.0 billion in 1999 as restated in a later filing, $15.2 billion in 2009, $6.2 billion in 2024 and $7.0 billion in 2025, a year that includes Lexmark from July 1, 2025. That is about 63% less than in 1999, computed. Revenue was higher in 2011, $22.6 billion, after Xerox bought the services company ACS.
Market value fell further than revenue. On February 26, 1999, the Xerox shares held by outside investors were worth about $39.7 billion, according to the cover of its 1998 annual report. On October 23, 2026, the whole company was worth about $336 million, computed. That is about 99% less, in dollar terms and not adjusted for inflation, even though the 1999 figure counts only outside shareholders and the 2026 figure counts every share.
Market value is a price set each trading day for a company's shares, not a record of where its ideas came from. The Alto story and the $336 million figure measure two different things, which is how a lab can be years ahead while its parent company is valued today at a small fraction of Apple and Microsoft.
Watch the short video: YouTube