Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 11/86 - checked

November 1986

Recent events have tickled my fancy. `Recent' that is in relative terms - by the time you get to read this it will be ancient history, such are the fates of publishing. The events in question have revolved around a small fruit company, Apricot, and its almost complete transformation from putative world mega-company to parochial manufacturer of up-market business systems.

This set me to thinking, a difficult and slow process at the best of times - which is why this has taken so long to appear. However, the thought was approximately as follows: there has to be an easier way of making lots of money, and in particular profit, from this microcomputer business without all the efforts, strains and interesting ways to have heart attacks that attempting to become a world mega-company involves.

The reciprocal of this thought took some time to appear, but eventually, at a particularly tedious press conference when I had effectively switched my brain off for a while, the idea occurred to me. I hope that British Telecom doesn't take this too personally, but......

BT, you see, has an interesting reputation amongst us journalistic persons. If we ask any company in the computer business, from the largest to the smallest one-person-who's-just-thought-of-this-really-silly-software-package company, they will all proudly boast of having British Telecom as a major customer. To be fair to BT, Shell Oil is another name that usually seems to feature.

The idea is for these companies to claim, or at least imply, that BT has approved their product for its own use and that, QED, it must be more than suitable for the likes of YOU.

Chase, as us journalistic persons are prone to do occasionally, one of these applications up however and a slightly different story often emerges. Yes, a department of BT has bought one of whatever it is, but only one. It is not approved, just on evaluation, and it is, quite often, unlikely that any more will be bought in future.

In other words British Telecom, because of its position in computing and communications, has to buy one of everything and anything, just to check on what's available. It can't actually stop its suppliers listing it as a `major' customer, for you can't get much more major in company terms than BT, but it sometimes resents what that can be made to imply.

However, that notwithstanding, the idea which occured to me seemed straight forward... so much so I might even try it. What you do is to make a Z80 computer with a nominal amount of memory; 64K would seem appropriate for now. Give it a couple of 8-inch floppy disk drives and a workable operating system, perhaps a `personalised' version of CP/M.

Put all this in a box, together with a monitor and a good keyboard. The box must be very classy looking: it must reek of `expensive'. Now, make just one and sell it to BT as the MB 001PC for £27,500.

As already outlined, BT seems to have this understandable policy of buy one of anything that might appear relevant, and what could appear more relevant than the MB 001PC.

In subsequent years, this could be followed by the MB 002PC (dual 5.25 inch disks, and 128K bytes of memory, bank switched) and the MB 001XT (guess the specification). Then, start all over again with the MB 101PC family, based on the Intel 8088, the MB 201 (8086) and the MB 301 (80286 processor).

There you go, 12 years of steady if unspectacular revenue with an attractively interesting profit margin. Just the sort of business I would guess that companies such as Apricot might now be after.

Apricot tried to take on the world in the personal computer business, a perfectly laudible exercise, and it should not be condemned out of hand for having failed. That is as much a function of lack of clout in a world marketplace (of the `who is Apricot?' and `England, is that near Boston?' variety) as it is of having an almost very good product that didn't quite work as well as such a mass market demanded.

In the same way that successful women have to be twice as intelligent, sharp and nasty as a man to get on in this man's world (evidence available most nights, TV News), so upstart computers companies have to be four times better than IBM at everything (including earning money) to really crack open the PC business.

Just ask Apple, who arguably created the `business' of the PC business. Official MS-DOS add-ons for the Macintosh are a'coming: even the mightiest can't knock it.

So Apricot (or its bank manager) has decided that discretion is the better part of valour and it is going to aim itself at the upper reaches of the PC business, where making smaller numbers with higher margins are the order of the day.

This is an area where a number of smaller companies, and in particular British companies, seem to have done OK. Companies such as Comart, Jarrogate, Research Machines and the like have all carved out their own little niches in the PC marketplace, filling in the holes that the likes of Big Blue can't bothered with or can't service properly.

I sometimes get the feeling that this is a much more sensible approach to business, anyway. Certainly, from a journalistic viewpoint such companies are normally boring, there is never much news to be had from their ilk, but their variety and scope means that many of them do well, and make a nice, steady living.

This contrasts well with those companies, Apricot included, which think it the only way to be in business to be the biggest, the only and the most supremely mega-company in the world. Sods Law says that there will only ever be room for one of those in any industrial field, which for the computer industry means there is absolutely no point in trying, the position is not vacant. It also means that, should you ever get there, all you do is become paranoid about everyone, who by definition must be the `enemy' (even the customers, sometimes).

As someone once wrote, small is actually pretty good looking, and a lot less aggravating. Now, where's my soldering iron; BT, here comes the MB 001PC.

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