"Thank you," Matthew said. "But the congratulations should go to all of your people who made the development of the Joey Plus successful." His smile swept each face at the table.
Martin Cohn stood and announced the agenda, a copy of which rested before each person. Four items down the list was "The Whole World In Your Hand: Wallaby's Future - Matthew."
After ninety minutes of standard status reports, discussion, and voting, it was time for Matthew's presentation, and he stood. "Should we break for a few minutes before I begin?"
He knew his agenda title had them all intrigued - this would be the first time anyone but Peter had revealed a major future strategy for Wallaby. No one stood or motioned departure.
He dimmed the room lights, then switched on the overhead projector and advanced to the first slide, a modified Wallaby logo. Normally the logo depicted the baby kangaroo poking its head out of a pocket, but Matthew's slide showed only the joey and no pocket.
"At Wallaby," he began, "we've always been intensely focused on the idea of people using a portable computer for their personal tasks and needs. This had been a successful strategy, inherent in our culture because we got our start by giving people the power to use our portable personal computers for exactly that: very personal computing.
"But to some degree, we've been in the dark. In the early days we succeeded because we were the only players. But we lost our number-one status to our largest competitor, ICP."
He changed to the next slide and paused for a moment, allowing the visual analogy depicted to sink in. The slide showed the same lone joey, offset to the bottom left corner of the frame, and a sketch of the earth with the initials ICP stretching around it.
"International Computer Products is everywhere. They own the world of mainstream computing. There's hardly any big business, organization, or function in the world that doesn't in some way use ICP's products for its information processing."
The next slide showed the Joey Plus screen with little filing cabinets and documents positioned here and there. "By design, Wallaby's Joey Plus is the choice method of computing. The user community has stated that, and we all know that.