From Kalamazoo to Silicon Valley and Beyond (K2SV+)

I had plenty to do at ACM .  Initially and from time to time as expat colleagues  came and went, I was a one-man band. I wrote new product briefs, drummed up feature story ideas (and assigned them to myself), suggested and approved layouts, attended press events, recruited tech consultants to write contributed articles and competed with the pile of papers on Peter’s desk to get his signoff on my pages. While I got the issues out the door, I slowly built something more valuable -- my internal map of the tech landscape. I learned, for instance, that IBM was clearly king of the business-computing hill with its powerful mainframes and deep tech knowhow. But Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corp., Unisys and a gang of others were in hot pursuit with their less expensive, somewhat more agile minicomputers that ran proprietary flavors of Unix, an operating system pioneering a trend to open-source software you could sometimes get for free. This was fodder for dozens of stories. But ...

The new job was the start of what would be more than 35 years reporting on semiconductors in what some called the deep tech trades.   Like ACM , Electronic World News carried a grand mission on the backs of a skeleton staff of writers and salespeople. In EWN ’s case, most of the crew had day jobs at EE Times or EBN . In those days, working for EE Times was a prestigious, but demanding gig. The weekly newspaper had recently risen to the top of the heap in its niche as the Bible for the folks who made chips or anything that used them. The staffing synergies CMP hoped EWN would find eventually became points of contention, cracks that started to show. And like other colonists, the newspaper’s publishers failed to see their so-called global market was really a discrete collection of local markets that preferred local publications in their local languages. At the time, my concerns were more basic. I wasn’t really sure what semiconductors were or who made them with the exceptio...

Hong Kong was expensive, but we found a two-bedroom flat we could afford in an old three-story apartment building just off the main road of a finger of land at the southern tip of the territory. Stanley (pictured above) was the home of to-die-for luxury high-rise towers on the ocean-view side. On the other side, a shanty town of tin shacks for working class Chinese sprawled over a deep crevasse between two hills. Like a city from another time, folks jerry-rigged their own water and electric systems and set up their own shops. The curious could walk through if they didn’t mind an elderly woman who might make a rude face or comment loudly in Cantonese on their presence. A labyrinthine market separated the two communities, catering mainly to streams of tourists hunting for cultural antiques, T-shirts and other tchotchkes. In between the tourist traps, Stanley market hosted fruit and vegetable stands and several small restaurants, mainly geared to the expats, all covered by a patchwork...

Shanghai Bund circa 1991 (Courtesy of Flickr) I loved exploring Southeast Asia. On the thinnest of story ideas, I took business trips to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, colorful, mysterious countries, often with good snorkeling, exotic foods and achingly gorgeous women. In their first phase of globalization, chip makers peppered the region with assembly and test factories. They offered mainly manual, semi-skilled jobs, putting slices of silicon into packages and making sure they performed to spec. Workers, at these plants, usually women, didn’t earn much money, and -- except for occasional strikes in Thailand that sent me scrambling for the airport -- they didn’t generate many good stories either. The place everybody wanted to read more about was China. It felt like every major corporation was trying to score a joint venture deal there, despite at least one book, “Beijing Jeep,” that mapped the bumpy rode American Motors travelled. China was always trying to s...

Here I need to rewind to May 1989 when I was still working at Asian Computer Monthly . The news about the brain drain fell to the back page as students in Beijing took to the streets. They were inspired in part, some said, by a visit from Mikhail Gorbachev and perhaps in part to shake off the same social dysfunctions that killed every Western joint venture as well as their prospects for a prosperous future. It was all eyes on China for weeks. Someone with links to the U.S. embassy in Hong Kong later told me a couple of her friends went missing during that time and their social crowd felt confirmed in their suspicions they were spooks. The tensions rose as we saw pictures of Zhao Ziyang in tears pleading with students in their tents pitched in Tiananmen Square that they must go home. Then one night in early June, the horrific massacre began. At noon the first day after we watched the nightmare unfold on CNN, companies in Hong Kong released staff for a day of mourning. We all str...