A lesson in ethics

     Ironically as PCs became more useful and user friendly, the industry became less interesting to cover. It was sad.

It was easy to blame Intel and Microsoft, but in some ways, it was just business, the cold heart of capitalism. And I was not exactly a paragon of virtue.

As the PC guy, I felt pressure to get a big lead story in the run up to Comdex. I worked my sources, including one hard working senior engineer at Acer, at the time Taiwan’s biggest branded maker of PCs. I’ll call him Freddy.

I had been cultivating a relationship with him for months over coffee, dinner, whatever. As Comdex neared, I peppered him with all sorts of questions on everything I knew or thought might be going on.

Somewhere along the line he mentioned something that pricked up my reporter’s ears: His CEO, Stan Shih, was going to meet at Comdex with Apple’s then-CEO, Michael Spindler. Shih aimed to convince Spindler to give him a license to make clones of Macintosh computers as a path to growth for both companies.

It was a reasonable idea. There were no profits in PCs and Apple was struggling for sales given its relatively high-priced products. Thanks to a slow news week, my story took the lead slot on Page 1 of EE Times in the week before Comdex. It sported separate file headshots of Shih and Spindler.

Acer didn’t get the deal at Comdex, but I later 
commissioned an OEM cover story arguing 
for Mac clones.

Several weeks later I made a routine call to check in on Freddy about some other topic. He said he couldn’t talk to me anymore.

“Why did you print that story” he asked me, his voice full of bitterness.

“What do you mean,” I replied dumbfounded, but already feeling a bit guilty.

“Stan called everyone in and said he wanted to know who talked about his meeting with Apple,” he said.

Freddy had stepped forward. As punishment, he was sent back to Taiwan from Silicon Valley where he had been trying to eke out a better life for his growing family.

“Why did you tell him? The story never named anyone,” I asked.

“It was the right thing to do,” he said.

I never called or heard from Freddy again, but I never forgot him either. I had sunk a good man’s career for a story, and not even a great one at that.

Next: Post mortems for the PC

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