A Tech Reporter in Hong Kong
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 something else that seemed even bigger was just starting to happen: Businesses were slowly adopting dramatically less expensive PCs.
Luckily, Peter had a subscription to Infoworld, a top weekly trade rag out of Silicon Valley chronicling this shift. It became my Bible. I poured over every article while on my long commutes, sitting at an open window on the top of double decker buses, often so engrossed in this nerd text I would look up woozy with motion sickness as the bus lunged and lurched around the narrow, winding roads of South Island, belching black exhaust.
To this day, I owe a debt to InfoWorld’s crack editorial team that included editor-in-chief Stewart Alsop, who later became a successful investor in tech startups, as well as its tongue-in-cheek back-page columnist, Robert X. Cringely who later wrote “Triumph of the Nerds,” a PBS video series on the rise of the PC. I borrowed their insights to sound smart at cocktail receptions folks like the Hong Kong IT Federation held at the Mandarin Oriental and other swank hotels.
I learned that one wrote about these emerging PCs mainly with numbers. They ran on something called an Intel 286 or 386 microprocessor at amazing speeds of 10 and 20 and 30 megahertz and needed memory of 5 or 10 megabytes of RAM or ROM to store and spit out their results.
More speed, more memory. That was the main vector for the next several years until the industry forked into mobile and cloud computing. Then I learned to track how small or large chips got and how little or much power they used. Simple enough for an English major.
Back in the 386 days, the latest beige desktops were being built to run software like IBM OS/2, or better yet, Microsoft Windows that could display colorful animated fish swimming past you on the display. (Who needs to work when you can watch your digital fishbowl!) Even more important, these PCs were going to hang from cables called local-area networks to power client-server computing, the next big thing destined to torpedo both mainframes and minicomputers and make a lot of young microcomputer entrepreneurs wealthy.
A poster at the Asia headquarters of HP where I was a frequent visitor captured the trend. It showed how in the progress from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs, companies would buy more and more stuff. This optimistic hockey stick of “up and to the right” informed hundreds of Powerpoint presentations that articulate, well-dressed marketing managers would show me about their latest products. Their optimism was infectious, fueling hundreds of stories I’d write. Years later, one of my publishers would describe our work as serving “the endless fascination about the future of technology.”
The tech reality was much less dramatic than my stories. The office PCs at ACM had no speedy 386 CPUs. They lacked the umph and memory to run the latest version of Microsoft Windows. I had no graphical user interface (no colorful fish) or LAN, just green characters on a black screen connected on sneaker net as we passed our 5.25-inch floppy disks around. But we had faith we would get to the next big thing. And we would, typically a few years after a bigger, better next big thing appeared on the horizon.
PCs were so crude in those days that I made the completely reasonable prediction in an April 1990 story that DOS -- the boring black-and-white, text-only operating system of the first mainstream desktops -- would be what most folks in Asia used for some time to come. No icons, no fishes in our foreseeable future. The story followed a March report describing a “long, winding road” to the multimedia PC that at the time would cost an estimated $10,000+ to assemble and would still fail to dazzle. Today, every computer sold has all the multimedia features the article imagined and more, packed into laptops that could fit into a manila envelope -- and they generally sell for less than a thousand bucks.
As I would later hear Bill Gates say, technology transitions typically take much longer than we expect, but have greater impact than we imagine. He had that one right.
A Land of Opportunities
A couple years into my tech apprenticeship, I attracted an offer from a former editor of ACM who was making bank in tech PR. (One reason ACM struggled is its editors kept leaving for these greener fields.) I would listen with rapt attention and a tall German beer over lunch in the trendy Lan Kwai Fong district just around the corner from my office as Euan Barty (below) held forth about who was really who and what was actually what among the people and companies I covered.
Euan was a brilliant Brit with, it seemed, an opinion on everything, and he was typically better informed than me. I recall hikes with him around Lamma Island and the Sai Kung Park area he later made his home. He was quite a challenge to keep up with on the trail and in conversation.
I
liked and admired Euan for his smarts, his candor and how he built a business
that’s still thriving today. But leaving tech reporting for PR felt like a leap
too far. And besides I was starting to have a good time bathing in the froth of
all the free lunches, dinners and occasional business trips I was now getting
from tech companies.
Mike Dunn, another former ACM editor who left to make more money in tech PR during the Hong Kong boom, liked the good life, too. Mike was renown among the local press corps for hosting an amazing blow-out of a junket with the PR budget German company Nixdorf was spending to get some ink.
On Nixdorf’s dime, a group of us travelled to Singapore, then Germany and Greece. Each stop had lavish meals and lots of alcohol. During a delay on the tarmac somewhere, Mike insisted the crew open a few bottles of champagne to rally his thirsty and impatient guests from the tech press.
The trip offered few good stories, but packed lots of laughs. Shortly after we returned and our articles got published, Siemens, one of Germany’s largest companies, acquired Nixdorf and our generous host was heard from no more. We all felt used. The trip was probably a small part of a corporate plan to prop up the sale price. But as songwriter Bill Withers said, if that’s what it feels like being used, you can keep on using me ‘til you use me up.
Amid these pleasant distractions, I stuck with my small, struggling magazine until a smart and humble Texan came to town.
Rob Lineback (below) was a seasoned, hard-working and upbeat tech reporter and editor who eventually became a damned fine industry analyst, too. Back then, he was looking for a local bureau editor for Electronic World News (EWN), a fortnightly broadsheet newspaper about the deep tech world of semiconductors.
EWN was intended as a vehicle to find new markets in Europe and Asia for CMP, a publishing company started on a Long Island family’s kitchen table with a trade newspaper for purchasing managers, Electronic Buyer’s News (EBN), and later one for engineers, Electronic Engineering Times (EE Times), where I’d spend most of my career.
Rob had to navigate internal politics at CMP. EBN and EE Times were in some ways rivals. Their editors tried to beat each other to big stories, and their salespeople competed for ad dollars. EWN depended on both to get access to good stories and ads, a set up that put Rob in awkward situations.
Rob’s optimism was also afflicted by a 275-pound malady that traveled with him in the form of a talented but irritable editorial director named Bob Henkel. Herr Henkel, as folks sometimes called him, was a veteran tech editor from BusinessWeek, so he carried the big-league gravitas that trade pubs coveted.
“Bob could be hard to deal with sometimes,” Rob told me years later.
He recalled a long flight to Tokyo that wore Bob down. When a Japanese executive ahead of him reclined his seat, Bob went ballistic, shaking the seat with his brawny hands.
Like a bickering couple, the Rob and Bob Show was at turns entertaining and ugly. Rob would offer some thoughtful comment in his kindly Texan twang, then Bob would reflexively pour the verbal equivalent of scalding water over Rob’s head to prove he was the smarter of the two. They staged a sort of Laurel-and-Hardy imitation at my job interview in a tiny hotel meeting room.
I used my offbeat wit to deflect their harder questions. Patiently, they coached me to the proper answers. Slowly, I realized they were looking for an independent investigative reporter who might someday hire and manage a team of regional stringers. Clearly, I was as unsophisticated a prospect as you could imagine, but I could talk and write and knew my way around the Hong Kong offices of IBM, Hewlett-Packard and a dozen other major customers of semiconductors, so they hired me.
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