October 22 in business history: a copy made without chemicals, 11,345 dismissals, and Windows 7
Three October 22s — a dry copy in 1938, 11,345 dismissals in 1981 and Windows 7 in 2009 — were each won by taking something out, and each bill landed years later on someone who had not decided it.
Three October 22s. Three decisions won by taking something out.
A copying process with the chemistry taken out. A workplace with the union taken out of it. A software release with the ambition taken out.
Each removal worked at the time. Each bill arrived years later, and it landed on somebody who had not made the decision.
The copy with no chemicals
On 22 October 1938, in a rented room above a bar in Astoria, Queens, Chester Carlson made an image on paper. He used no camera and no liquid developer. 12
The apparatus was improvised. A zinc plate coated with sulfur, rubbed with a handkerchief until it held a charge. 1 A glass microscope slide inked with the words 10-22-38 ASTORIA, laid on top. 1
Lycopodium powder was dusted across the plate and blown away, and it stayed only where the light had passed. 1 Carlson pressed waxed paper onto the powder and heated the sheet, and the image transferred. 1 Otto Kornei, a German refugee physicist, worked the experiment with him. 1
The subtraction was the chemistry. The other copying methods of the day needed wet processing or photographic film; this one needed neither. 1 The word coined for it, by an Ohio State classics professor working from the Greek, means dry writing. 1
Then Carlson tried to sell it. From 1939 to 1944 more than twenty companies turned him down, and the National Inventors Council dismissed the work. 1 He called the reception "an enthusiastic lack of interest." 2
The buyer, when one came, was not a copier company. Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit laboratory in Columbus, took on the development in 1944 for 60 per cent of the royalties. 1 In 1947 Battelle licensed the process to Haloid, a photo-paper maker in Rochester that had earned $101,000 on $6.75 million of sales the year before. 1
Haloid then spent $12.5 million developing the 914 copier, more than its total earnings from 1950 through 1959. 1 Its engineers predicted 5,000 placements in three years; 10,000 had shipped by the end of 1962. 1
Net income went from $2 million in 1959 to $22.6 million in 1963, and the company took the name Xerox in 1961. 1
Decision mirror: On 1 July 2025 the company that invention built completed its purchase of Lexmark International for $1.5 billion, including net debt. 3
The combined business serves about 200,000 clients in 170 countries, and Xerox expects about $240 million of cost synergies. 3 The prize it names is scale in managed print services. 3
Eighty-seven years after the dry copy, the money is in consolidating the market the invention created, not in the process that created it.
The employer that removed the union
On 22 October 1981 the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the union that represented the government's controllers. 45
A federal appeals court stayed the order the same day. 5 The stay did not save the union; PATCO dissolved that year. 6
On 3 August 1981, at 7 a.m., about 13,000 controllers walked out after contract talks collapsed. 7 Some 7,000 flights were cancelled that day, at the peak of the summer season. 7
The union had endorsed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign. 6 The union asked for a four-day, 32-hour week and a $10,000 raise across the board, for controllers paid $20,462 to $49,229 a year. 7
Only 1,300 returned inside Reagan's 48-hour deadline. On 5 August the administration dismissed 11,345 of them and barred them from federal service for life. 6
The removal was quick. The replacement was not. The FAA said staffing would be restored in two years, and it took about ten. 6 A new controller takes about three years to train. 6
A new union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, was certified on 19 June 1987 with no link to the old one. 6 The lifetime ban was lifted on 12 August 1993, and by 2006 only about 850 of the dismissed controllers had been rehired. 6
Decision mirror: In November 2025 the system showed what it had been running on. Controllers worked without pay through a government shutdown, and staffing shortfalls multiplied. 8
It was the longest shutdown in the country's history. 9
On 6 November the FAA ordered a 4 per cent cut at 40 high-traffic airports from the 7th, rising to 10 per cent by the 14th, after 2,740 delays the previous weekend. 8 Staffing triggers peaked at 81 on 8 November. 9
The order was terminated on 17 November, after the shutdown ended. 9
An employer can remove a workforce in one morning. It cannot remove its dependence on one.
The release built by deletion
Windows 7 went on sale worldwide on 22 October 2009, the successor to a Vista release that had reached consumers in January 2007. 1011
Microsoft sold it on subtraction. The launch release promises an operating system that makes it "easier for people to do the things they want on a PC." 10 The features it lists take steps away rather than add power: a redesigned taskbar, a home network group, a gesture that snaps two windows side by side. 10
The company said the design came from 8 million beta testers and more than a billion opt-in customer sessions. 10 It also shipped onto cheap hardware, with PCs on sale from under $300. 10
The commercial result was not smaller. More than 240 million licences sold in the first year, which Microsoft called the fastest-selling operating system in history. 12
By 30 June 2010, 175 million had sold, and the fiscal year closed at record revenue of $62.48 billion, up 7 per cent. 13
The removal worked, and the installed base stayed. That is where the bill came due.
Decision mirror: Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on 14 October 2025, and offered consumers a year of security updates free if they synced settings through Windows Backup, or for $30, or for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points. 14
In June 2026 the programme was quietly extended to 14 October 2027. 14 Around 400 million active PCs still fail the hardware requirements for Windows 11. 14
The company that won by taking features out of a release now sells the exception to taking a system out of service.
Three questions for the day
- Which decision in front of you this week is a removal dressed up as a simplification?
- If the thing you remove turns out to be load-bearing, how long does the rebuild take, and who pays for it?
- Who is still your customer only because leaving costs more than staying?
References
- 1Xerox, "The Story of Xerography"
xerox.com
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- 3Xerox, "Xerox Completes the Acquisition of Lexmark," 1 July 2025
investors.xerox.com
- 4PATCO v. FLRA, 672 F.2d 109 (D.C. Cir. 1982)
law.justia.com
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- 10Microsoft, "Microsoft Simplifies the PC With Windows 7," 22 October 2009
news.microsoft.com
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- 12Microsoft, "Celebrating Windows 7 at 1 Year," 21 October 2010
blogs.windows.com
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