But something had gone wrong.
Matthew, for all of his management strength, did not fit in at Wallaby the way Peter would have liked. Looking back, he remembered Matthew's suggestion, about a year ago, that perhaps Wallaby's portable computers could become more compatible with ICP's systems. That was what had started Peter wondering if, in the long run, Matthew was right for Wallaby. Dismissing Matthew's idea as a naive insult, Peter only wished now that he had paid better attention. How could Matthew think Wallaby should abandon its founding vision of giving high technology power to the individual with a personal computer or portable interactive assistant in favor of creating mere peripherals that connected to ICP's dictatorial, impersonal desktop and mainframe computers? What's more, at about this time their friendship began to deteriorate. Up until the disagreement over the company's direction, the two had spent nearly every Saturday afternoon together, going for long walks or drives. Apparently because of Peter's reaction, Matthew stopped spending Saturday afternoons with him. When Peter would ring the gate bell at Matthew's mansion, the housekeeper would divulge that Mr. and Mrs. Locke had gone out for the day. Peter had felt wounded. Matthew had been the first person with whom he had experienced any sort of real friendship. Or so he'd thought. Scolding himself for having allowed his feelings to become personal, he displaced his hurt by pouring himself more intensely into his work, in an all-out effort to substantiate his side of the contention that had cost him his only friend.
The real challenge now was to get the Joey Plus quickly out the door and into the user's hands and, put to rest once and for all the criticism the original Joey had received. The Joey personal interactive assistant was the product of three years of hard work and engineering magic. Peter, the inventor of the original Wallaby Mate personal computer, had created the Joey as a radically different and intuitively designed portable computer. Named after the Australian word for baby kangaroo, the Joey was compact and thin and easy to transport, and it lasted for days on a single charge. In its simplest configuration, the basic Joey was about the size of a slender hardback book and almost as light, and it slipped easily into a briefcase. It worked as either a traditional notebook computer, or as a keyboard-less slate computer, and its built-in modem made it easy to access on-line services and the Internet, or send and receive faxes. Users interacted with Joey using either a stylus by "drawing" directly on its color active-matrix screen, or with the full-size keyboard and trackpad that stealthily slid out from its underside. Or with a combination of both stylus and keyboard, if they preferred. That was what made the Joey so unusual and compelling - its flexibility. Especially when the owner returned with it to the office, or took the Joey home. There, the Joey attached easily to a variety of snap-on peripherals that turned the base unit into a more powerful desktop system. Expanded keyboards. Mice. Monitors. Printers. Scanners. CD-ROM players. Stereo speakers. Enhanced network peripherals. And most any other peripheral device available for ordinary personal computers.
But the machine had its faults. Though it was technically superior to ICP's portable computers, software developers hesitated to invest the costly technical and human resources required to create new programs for it. Because its design was so new and different, many software developers were fearful of straying beyond the safe boundaries of developing programs for anything but ICP's series of computers, regardless of their plain-vanilla functionality. In the few short years since they had become players in the portable computer industry, ICP had attained an installed base of millions of portable systems worldwide, which dwarfed the few hundred thousand Joey systems Wallaby had sold since its introduction. To a software developer, ICP's user base numbers were too great to ignore, regardless of what the future potential of a device like the Joey might be.
Peter clicked the print button on the computer screen. The laser printer on his desk hummed. A few moments later the revised company organization chart rolled out of the printer.
Nowhere in the drawing did Matthew Locke's name appear.
In tomorrow's board meeting, Peter intended to surprise the team by proposing his newly drawn organization. Peter himself would temporarily fill the president-and-CEO slot until a qualified replacement was found. Though Peter had spent little time with the members of his executive staff over the past few months, he knew that they had faith in him. He was their leader, the company's crown jewel. In founding his company he had founded an industry, one that had made every member of his senior executive staff a multimillionaire. Without a doubt, their loyalties rested with him. Any other possibility never occurred to him; he had too many more significant issues to contend with, like leaky batteries.
Leaving his office, Peter stopped for a moment to appreciate the sharp and elegant lines of the Joey prototype resting on the shelf beside his desk. In just two months, according to his plan, the world would finally benefit from his original Joey vision: the new Joey Plus. His plan for providing the Joey engineering group with more engineers was precisely what was going to move it off his shelf and onto buyers' desktops.
Peter's secretary Peggy looked past her computer screen as she heard his office door close.
"I'm leaving for the day," he said.