What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (46 page)

We brought out the CPC6128 in August 1985, a very slick and slim-looking grey computer with a floppy disk drive in place of the old cassette mechanism. We also doubled the amount of memory to 128k. It became a massive seller in all markets due to its perceived higher technology. People considered it a
real
computer.

The success of our computers was seriously threatened at one time by a lack of components. This was a new phenomenon for me. In the audio, TV and VCR markets, I don't think there was ever a time when our style was cramped by a lack of materials. In general, suppliers would advise us that they needed sixty or ninety days' advance notice for their component orders and we would simply work within those guidelines. There
was
a brief shortage of ferrite for loudspeaker magnets at one point, as most of the raw material came from Africa and I believe that the Africans got fed up being beaten up on price and cut off the supply, but this lasted no more than a month or so.

However, in the computer market, memory chip manufacturers (basically a handful of giant American and Japanese companies) would suddenly decide to give up making certain sizes of memory chip as technology advanced. The CPC464 and CPC6128 used a bunch of 64k D-RAMs - eight pieces were used in the CPC464, sixteen in the CPC6128. Now manufacturers were giving up making 64k chips and moving on to larger sizes such as 256k. No one wanted to supply us with 64k chips any more and there was a severe shortage of memory chips throughout the world. It got to the stage where production was stopping and we couldn't manufacture computers.

Thankfully, Samsung had just started to enter this market and, like all new boys, they decided to start with the lowest technology, namely 64k chips. We ended up persuading Samsung to continue to run their 64k chip production and we bought millions of chips from them in order to keep the CPC464 and CPC6128 running.

While it would have been possible to redesign the computer to accommodate the new type of chip (as the 256k chip was effectively configured as 4 x 64k), it would have meant a complete re-layout of the PCB and there simply wasn't time.

It was a worrying period for me as a manufacturer, but it also reminds me of a funny incident at the time. At home one Saturday, I was preparing to play tennis with a friend of mine, Ivor Spiro. We were sitting in the kitchen chatting about things in general when suddenly the doorbell rang.

Standing at the door were two rather smartly dressed gentlemen. They announced that they were sorry to disturb me, but were here on ministerial business. I automatically assumed that these two blokes had come from the council to discuss some planning consent we'd applied for on the field next to the house. Then it dawned on me that it was Saturday, so it'd be highly unlikely that any officials would come round.

It took another couple of minutes of conversation for me to realise that they were Jehovah's Witnesses, and that the ministering they were doing was on behalf of the Lord. They asked whether there was anything the Lord could do for me. How funny that two Jehovah's Witnesses had turned up to confront me and Ivor Spiro, two Jewish fellows.

I decided to humour these two chaps. 'Perhaps there
is
something you could help me with,' I said, keeping a straight face.

The more senior of the two gentlemen looked interested and pleased that I was about to call upon their assistance. 'How may the Lord help you, sir?'

'Any chance you can get two and a half million 64k D-RAMs?'

He laughed and replied that the Lord has been known to do many things, but that one was rather challenging.

Anyway, these two fellows didn't want to leave, so I cut them short by telling them that, in actual fact, I had a special consultant there who dealt with these matters and if they wouldn't mind, I'd call him over and leave them to explain their work to him and then he would report back to me.

They agreed quite readily, at which point I shouted over to Arthur the gardener, who was hovering in the background wondering what was going on.

Arthur! I'd like you to help me out here. I have two gentlemen that need your specialised attention.'

'Righto, sir. Leave it to me, sir. With respect, sir, you go and play tennis with your friend, sir, and I shall deal with the two gentlemen and report back to you, sir.'

'Thank you, Arthur. Yes, would you kindly do that. They're here on important matters. Would you please take them away and deal with them.'

This was the first time I'd ever found a good use for Arthur. He would bore the pants off these two to such an extent that they'd never come back.
About ten or fifteen minutes later, when Ivor and I had started our match,

Arthur stormed up the path to the tennis court.

'Thank you very much, sir, thank you very much. You lumbered me with those two blokes. With respect, sir, I'm a gardener - what do I know about the Lord's work?'

'Never mind, Arthur, you've done a very good job. Have they gone?'

'Not half, sir. I told them to clear off and not to bother you again!'

*

I mentioned earlier about protectionism in Spain. In August 1985, I had a panicked telephone call from Dominguez telling me there was a serious problem, that all computers of 64k and below were now banned from importation into Spain. This was because a Spanish manufacturer was producing a 64k computer and had managed to get the Spanish government to impose a rule blocking all others. This was a disaster for Dominguez and Amstrad - by now we were selling thousands of computers in Spain. This new rule would effectively shut us down.

If anyone knows about dealing with Spain, they will be aware that it would be an insurmountable task to try to argue this point legally with the Spanish customs and government - we had to find another way to overcome the problem. The simplest and most obvious solution was to increase the computer's memory, but that would mean some high-level design changes and re-engineering. Even at the fast pace Amstrad worked, there was no way we could pull it off in time for the forthcoming Christmas market.

The computer boffins out there will cringe when they hear what I did next. I felt the trick I was about to play was morally justified because the Spanish government was trying to impose import regulations simply to protect one of their mates in the local market. I remembered that nearly twenty years earlier there was a fad in the portable transistor radio market, whereby the more transistors in the radio, the better it was claimed to be. The fact was, those radios only needed six transistors to work, but some Hong Kong manufacturers used to stick four extra transistors - which did nothing - on the PCB, simply so they could label their sets 'ten-transistor'.

We needed to do a similar sort of thing on our computer. Fortunately, the main operating system ROM chip was fitted on the PCB by means of an IC socket; it wasn't soldered in permanently. I suggested to my people in Brentwood that we design a mini-PCB which would hold the ROM chip as well as an extra single 64k D-RAM chip (and a few peripheral components). I also
asked my technical geniuses to come up with some justification as to what this extra chip was doing, rather than be sitting in mid-air going nowhere. They did - but don't ask me what it was! This mini-PCB, with its additional D-RAM, then plugged into the original IC socket.

Based on this trick, it was true to say that the computer now had 72k of memory. We rushed the design of this mini-PCB to Orion. On top of this, we had to change the faceplate on the front of the computer which was labelled '64k, as well as all the packaging and the instruction manual. This was the brilliance of Orion and why it was so worthwhile putting up with Otake's nonsense. Once he got behind something, he moved at a speed I've not experienced in all my manufacturing life, neither before nor since. I don't know how he motivated his staff to do it, but within two weeks we were producing a special CPC464 for Spain with 72k of memory - all with new faceplates, books and packaging.

We had basically stuck two fingers in the air to the Spanish government, who were trying to screw our business, and there wasn't much they could do about it because at the cargo's point of entry into Spain, customs had to allow them through. We never received a technical challenge from anybody in the Spanish market. The bottom line was, we beat their system. Eventually, they scrapped the ruling, at which point we magically changed back to our standard 64k product. As a result of this exercise, we managed to sell at least another 50,000 units in the Spanish market that Christmas season. We'd have been in trouble otherwise, as all the advertising had been booked and the retailers had placed their orders.

*

Marketing was to play a big part in the Amstrad success story. On reflection, I'm a marketing person, effectively an advertising agent in disguise. Maybe that's why so often I didn't feel the need to seek the advice of advertising agencies in coming up with killer catchphrases for our adverts. Most of the headlines and punchlines in our adverts came from me. Rightly or wrongly, they seemed to work.

Originally, I thought that advertising agencies had some secret talent. They would come along and pitch their great ideas to me, the client. It transpired that the great idea was limited to the main punchline of the advert and from then on, the only great idea they had was to send you big bills for doing three parts of sod all. There were unbelievable charges for photography - things like setting the lighting scenes and the ambience, with a whole crew out on location in Lake Ullswater in the north of England, waiting for the
right moment to see the moon setting on the lake, with the rippling lights on the water and all that bollocks. I put up with one bout of this crap and then kicked their arses out.

Amstrad's philosophy was simple - pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap. Adverts had to be full-frontal: show the product, show what it does, show the price and tell the punters where they can go and buy it. Simple as that.

Never would one of my adverts win an award at an advertising fraternity bash at Cannes or Montreux. These people consider a good advert to be one that everyone remembers because it's funny or clever. How many times have you said to your friends, 'Have you seen that advert with the car parts all falling over each other - brilliant, isn't it?'

Yes, you're right - it
is
brilliant photography. The problem is, when you ask what company it was for, nobody remembers. Ask what car they were selling and nobody knows. The amount of money pissed up the wall by marketing managers for the sake of boosting their personal egos within the advertising fraternity is incredible. The bigger the firm, the bigger the waste. My idea of a good advert is something that shifts kit off the shelves, something that these creative geniuses seem to forget. And I wasn't having any part of joining this game.

I had rows with Marion in France when she tried to engage one of these creative twits. The guy was not prepared to reveal his advert until he'd talked Malcolm Miller and me through some twenty-minute presentation on the whys and wherefores of what a Frenchman does on a Thursday afternoon when he sticks his left leg out of the window in Toulouse on a rainy day. I told the guy that I wasn't interested in listening to all that demographic crap - just show me the bloody advert or I'm getting up and walking out, which is exactly what I did. I left Malcolm there to sit through all this boring bullshit.

When it finally got to the stage where we saw the adverts, they were crap. His whole concept was a pair of red boxing gloves. I looked at Malcolm and Marion and said, 'What are we sitting here talking to this twit for? What's a pair of boxing gloves got to do with flogging computers?'

Apparently, there was some subtle message, whereby the boxing gloves were there to show that we were going to punch everybody out of the marketplace. Brilliant. To add insult to injury, there was a tiny picture of the computer, about the size of a postage stamp, at the bottom corner of the advert, along with some subtle strapline in French.

It took a while for me to convince Marion this was not the way we were going. She was a lady who had a strong personality; not an easy person. She stood up and argued her corner, but in this particular case she started to
realise I was right. It did help somewhat when I told her that
I
was controlling the advertising budget in France and that she was hereby not authorised to spend one penny on this crap.

In Spain, Dominguez followed the Amstrad pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap model, replicating our adverts and sometimes bettering them. He'd really caught on to my train of thought.

It seems I didn't get it too wrong, as Amstrad went on to win the Marketing Society Award in 1985, 1986 and 1987, as well as the RITA Award 1986, the Management Today Award 1986, the British Micro Awards 1985 and 1986, the Golden Chip Award 1985 and the BEW Toby Award in 1986. It's a wonder I wasn't head-hunted by Saatchi & Saatchi!

*

Exhibitions were an important part of the computer industry, as they were with consumer electronics, and our first exhibition stand at the Olympia computer show was so popular we had a near-disaster. The stand was inundated with young people and trade buyers and at one stage I was becoming concerned that the raised floor would collapse. I'd never seen an exhibition stand so packed, nor have I since. It was as if we were giving away tenners for five quid. It was an unbelievable sight to stand back and watch, but, as I say, quite frightening at the time. In today's climate of health and safety, we would have been shut down.

Jose Dominguez's exhibition stands, which I visited in Madrid and Barcelona, were the most flamboyant. Jose would walk down the central aisle of the exhibition hall and people would virtually be bowing to him, as if the Don was arriving. Who knows how he'd got himself this reputation in such a short period of time, but if you imagine this short, dark-haired, heavily bearded man walking through the exhibition wearing a black suit with an overcoat draped over his shoulders, you'll get the picture. It was like a scene from
The Godfather.