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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday October 28, 2002 Volume IV Number 43 |
FOCUS - The Magic Link
To this day, in the nightstand beside my bed, at the bottom of the drawer, stowed away under a stack of long since forgotten issues of TIME and PC World Magazines, lies a little piece of technology representative of our new age of throw away electronic gadgetry. It is now a corpse, pronounced dead a long time ago. It will never again be useful. But there remains a lingering attachment to that little gray box the size of a hard cover Dostoyevsky novel, and about the same weight.
I can’t seem to let it go.
When I first learned about this portable computer, packing a processor and on board power source that was a word processor and a spreadsheet and a calendar and an address book and a daily planner all-in-one and you could plug a phone line into a socket and connect to your electronic mail and there was even a slot for a paging device so that anytime at all it could snatch messages out of the air, ring a little bell to announce the arrival of a personal note, and right there in the middle of doing something else anywhere in any major metropolitan area, you could tap out a reply and it would instantly be sent back over the airwaves right to the person who sent it.
The WOW factor was just too much. I remember those early “luggables,” first the Osborn then the KayPro, and then a company called Compaq dominated the marketplace with computers the size and shape and weight of a good sized sewing machine. The operating system they called CPM, and we stood wide eyed before those tiny little monochrome screens and watched the wizardry of WordStar and VisiCalc and Dbase – I then II then III. Guys, male and female, up and down the hallway, on the elevator, from the parking lot – the briefcase was converted to this “portable” computer. It weighed in at about forty five pounds, guaranteed to increase the heart rate and create beads of sweat all over on the way to the desk for a day’s work at the fold up keyboard on the newfangled machines. But virtually all the features of those old luggables were packed into this little gray box with an interactive screen that looked like a desktop.
Amazing.
The home page looked like an office. You could open the desk drawers by tapping them with your stylus. Or set the clock. Or drag and drop your e-mail from the top of your desk to the out-box. Or tap open the three drawer filing cabinet. You could even program a virtual pet puppy who would roam around the room, barking approvingly if you made the right moves.
I just had to have it.
It took awhile to save up enough money to buy one. In the interim, I would stop by The Good Guys just to look at it on the shelf. “Just lookin’,” I’d tell the guy with the logo name tag. (I rarely found an employee who knew as much as I did about the coveted product, so I usually waved off the “help.”) Most of the time, there were technical difficulties, so I couldn’t power up the demo model on display. (“Sorry, it was working earlier today… someone must have messed it up,” they’d explain.) So I would read the brochure and review all those incredible features again and again and imagine that baby sittin’ next to me on the front seat while traveling across town or in the board room there next to my yellow pad (which I really wouldn’t need anymore) during the meeting or on my lap at home as I sat in the overstuffed chair making phone calls or planning my business day. Sometimes, I’d get lucky, and it would fire it up there in the store and I’d take a demo tour of the little wonder worker and explore the software looking for magical little features somewhere on the memory chip and plan the day when I’d be setting up my own desktop on that machine, working through the owner’s manual, customizing it for my personal use.
That day finally came. And for the next couple of years, the high tech device was my daily companion. It was a Sony. I became a regular caller-in to Tech Support.
The sales guy never told me that the software was prone to crashes. When I popped a couple hundred dollars for the paging device, they didn’t explain that then coverage area was spotty and unreliable, that messages were frequently garbled beyond recognition or that the memory capacity was severely limited. But in spite of all the glitches and frustrating, time-consuming annoyances and long waits on hold for a techie to walk me through a solution, I maintained a strange loyalty to that little “time-saving” device primarily, I suppose, because it was so cutting edge.
They called it the Magic Link.
* * * * * * * * *
The Internet bubble (as we now call it) in retrospect was something like the Gold Rush of 1849.
In January of 1848, while building a sawmill in the Sacramento Valley, James W. Marshall, John A. Sutter’s partner in the venture, found a heavy yellow metal mixed in with the hard yellow soil. A local assayer confirmed it – gold. Marshall knew where there was lots of it.
Sutter’s Mill. The intent was to build a respectable business and provide construction grade lumber for the needs of the new little community of Sacramento, but with the discovery, everything changed. Sutter and Marshall called in their workers, along with the analyst who confirmed the finding, and swore them all to secrecy. They all agreed. Sutter knew that news of this sort would certainly threaten the whole operation, so the men determined to quietly work the ground and develop this new and unexpected business plan in a deliberate and cautious manner.
But such information was far to explosive to keep under wraps.
One of the workers whispered the news to General Store owner Samuel Brennan. Brennan, a shrewd business man with connections in San Francisco, began a search for every sort of equipment and supply a good miner might need. He began to stock his store which was just downriver from Sutter’s place. Then, he deliberately spread the word. He informed the newspapers and telegraph offices – Sutter discovered gold in the hills above Sacramento. Within days, gangs of eager explorers appeared on the river. Brennan’s business boomed.
Within months, the news attracted throngs of gold hunters from near and far. In an address to Congress, which was published in every newspaper in the United States, President James Polk announced that gold was plentiful in the California mountains, and the national economy received a tremendous boost as regular every day Americans became wealthy extracting the treasure from the streams and mines in abundance.
They called them Forty-Niners. Their dreams of riches energized impossible journeys across the Rocky Mountains, where many suffered disease and hardship. They came to California from Australia and China. Europeans traveled to Panama, and transversed overland through the City of Panama crossing narrow land bridge over the great divide to the Pacific Ocean and then north to San Francisco by sea. Others traveled all the way around Cape Horn, passing through the treacherous stormy waters around the southern tip of South America and north along the coast up to the California mountains. The demand for travel was so great, vessels packed with passengers, overloaded, made the impossible voyage. Many perished on the rocks around the dangerous Cape. All in search of riches.
By 1852 more than two hundred thousand seekers of gold poured into the Sacramento area, all looking for the same prize.
Some found it. Stories circulated all around the world of individuals staking claims and creating overnight gold mining businesses that yielded hundreds of dollars a day. This pre-Civil War bonanza created staggering wealth. For a few.
Towns appeared where there had been none. Local economies and townships and governments and law enforcement officials and saloons and hotels and blacksmiths and general stores sprang up like dandelions in Spring.
But most of those pilgrims with stars in their eyes and hope in their heart soon discovered that the herd arrived too late.
* * * * * * * *
The technology boom of 1999 came one hundred and fifty years after the gold rush boom of 1849. Jim Collins (Good to Great) identifies one of many illustrations. Internet dreams possessed innovators and venture capitalists alike, and business plans gone bust litter the pages of recent history like the dusty ghost towns baking in the California sun to this day.
Drugstore.com issued it’s first public offering on July 28, 1999. Its creators fully believed that the Internet would quickly replace the corner drug store as an efficient, fast and convenient provider for the nation’s consumption of pharmaceuticals. Even the issuers were surprised at the offering price, just under twenty dollars a share. The company had been in existence a mere nine months, there were fewer than five hundred employees and the business plan called for hundreds of millions in losses before there would be a profit, but there was no shortage of true believers. On the first day of the offering, in fact within seconds, the price shot up to sixty five dollars a share, and made the owners instant multi-millionaires. Drugstore.com had Walgreens in its crosshairs, and believed with fervor that their Internet alternative would make Walgreens a relic of the past.
Walgreens believed differently. They
believed in technology, but technology as a servant, not a master. While
Drugstore.com frantically searched for ways to get seniors to order their
medicines on-line, Walgreens built convenient corner stores, and focused on
their core business – a specific product line, competitively priced in the
context of superior customer service.
Two years later, Drugstore.com all but disappeared, along with a mountain of investor dollars. It soared to a high of over sixty dollars. Now it's barely worth more than a dollar. Today, Walgreens rules.
Collins quotes Bertrand Russell – “Most men would rather die than think. Many do.”
* * * * * * *
Sony dropped the Magic Link. Apple’s Newton has disappeared. Palm’s sales have stalled. Even Microsoft has floundered in the Pocket PC market. The vision of handheld devices that change the world remains a distant dream.
My old Magic Link there in the drawer won’t even boot up anymore.
In business, after the shock of terror, the ever present prospect of war, the upheaval in investor markets, we seem, by necessity, to be returning to traditional values. Values like hard work, deliberate planning, personal service and customer care, avoiding conflicts of interest, efficiencies in manufacturing. Simple things like profitability (measured by the simple calculation of selling price minus cost) and well-managed growth and treating people like people instead of codes and passwords and numbers. These are the new currencies.
I don’t know that it’s the dawning of a new age.
But it’s a welcome change.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Perhaps the wonderful world of technology seems too complicated to manage. That’s OK. Take your time. Keep the perspective that our machines serve us well, but today’s marvel will certainly be tomorrow’s relic. What sticks and endures are the relationships you cultivate and nurture – in the office and at home.
The boom times of 1849 and 1999 teach us something about the herd. If the crowds are chasing it with reckless abandon, it’s probably too late. Choose your causes and your goals with care. Maybe it’s OK to pick your books or your movies or your music from the top-of-the-chart list – but not your life plan.
There’s too much at stake.
You are unique in all the world.
Don’t be like them.
Be you.
That’s the real magic link.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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