Taiwanese Go-Cart

Something was burning. I could smell it in the air: plastic, electric, acrid. Since I was walking down the corridor inside the offices of UMAX, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, this was not good.

Turning the corner and approaching my cubicle, I recognized the scent, understood its meaning, and started to laugh. “What happened?” I asked my embarrassed UMAX engineer, just in from Taipei. Not a good start!

“I got a graphics card from inventory to test,” he said sheepishly. “But when I turned on PC, the board shorted.” I laughed again. He continued, “I think someone put a resistor backward.”

I slapped him on the shoulder. “This is why we need you to come to the U.S.,” I said with a laugh. “Now you will believe us when I say we have Quality Control issues!” Despite the bad news, I felt a reassuring sense of vindication.

To be sure, UMAX made excellent flatbed scanners. Their ambition to expand into other product lines was the reason they hired me as U.S. marketing manager. Yet I had little say in this expansion. Word would come down that we were introducing a a new graphics or video capture board. If there were any market assessment for these, I was unaware of it.

Based in the company’s Fremont office, I had a hard time convincing headquarters in Taipei to work more closely with us. We were the front lines! Let us into product development a little, I pleaded. Didn’t happen. I’d never been allowed to go to Taiwan and meet with engineering. They built it, shipped it, and told us to sell it.

From all my years in product marketing, I’d come to realize the pending disaster that arose from poor communication between engineering and marketing. At one tech-driven company, my complaints of printers that didn’t work on customer sites were met with a simple explanation: “Works fine on my machine.” So consoling to the stranded customer! I wasn’t surprised when the guys on one Air Force base poured gasoline on their trial printer and watched it burn.

At another, engineering was just across the hall. When I explained the bug problems I would have to face at an upcoming trade show, one engineer conceded sympathetically, “I guess you’re fucked!”

Now engineering was across an ocean. Then there were the language and cultural barriers. I wondered whether I should just pack up and leave. Hmm … wife and three daughters at home: nope, guess I’d stay and slug it out.

“Go back and get another one,” I encouraged the young Taiwanese engineer. “Maybe you’ll have better luck!” I sighed. Somewhere along the line — before they put it in a box — couldn’t they just plug it in and turn it on? It was one thing for a customer to install a board that didn’t work; it was another to fry his motherboard. Lord help us if that happened to a media reviewer!

How did I keep getting myself into these spots? The excitement of small companies? The thrill of rolling out new products? How about the necessity of a job to keep my family going? That was closer to the truth.

“You don’t need to demonstrate this board to sell it,” said Steven Lin, a Taiwanese entrepreneur who had sold his electronics company to UMAX. We were in a conference room talking about a graphics board he’d developed. “All you have to do is tell the story. The board will sell itself.”

Despite all the times I’d heard this phrase, I’d yet to see any product sell itself. This board was no exception. Steven’s display board had three separate processors, each one handling a single color for the RGB monitor — red, green, and blue. In theory, the board should have been lightning fast. Only it wasn’t.

Steven had used older, cheaper processors – after all, he needed three of them. Also older memory chips that had a single access in and out. It was like a chef putting food in a cupboard; then the waiter would open it up to take it out to the dining room. Traffic in and out of the kitchen got crowded.

Other manufacturers like ATI and Matrox used single chip processors that managed all three colors. Their newer memory had separate paths for in and out. It was akin to a pass-through counter from the kitchen to the dining room — much more efficient. Our boards sounded superior but came up last in the media evaluation races.

“Just keep sending them to reviewers. Everybody wins some. We’ll use those in our advertising,” said my boss, Vincent. Yet I knew that people read these reviews and made purchase decisions based on them. I considered adjusting my marketing strategy to address the uninformed, unintelligent, and easily impressed part of the market. We should be able to get at least a 50% penetration!

Eventually we developed a full line of multimedia products, next up being a video capture board. Fortunately, this market was not quite so competitive. Less happily, the reason for this lay in an unstable operating system from Microsoft, insufficient processing power from Intel and AMD, and software too complex for the mass market. Once again I found myself in the middle of this circus.

With our video capture board, I tried to get through product demos without having to reboot Windows95. Had Sisyphus used any Microsoft software? Our own application had problems too. After some inquiries into our product development effort, I heard that the division manager had brought back a copy of a U.S. program, handed it to his engineers and said, “Here, make some software that does this.”

Despite my product misgivings, I really liked the people at UMAX — both in California and in Taiwan. They were generally enthusiastic, cooperative and entrepreneurial — in a very opportunistic way. I preferred a more classic approach of finding a need, developing a superior product, and marketing it as a solid solution. At UMAX, I quickly understood the Taiwanese way of product marketing: load a lot of ads in the monthly reseller magazines, offer promotions and discounts, and sell the shit! Wanting a strategy that was more than a one-month sales forecast, I was out of place.

We introduced a new scanner modeled after another first mover, the Visioneer. Our desktop unit offered the promise of reducing the paper piles on my desk. At a Las Vegas trade show, I replaced a standard display station with an executive desk. The scanner sucked the incoming paper to the PC; the physical sheet could be tossed, its contents saved forever in a versatile, digital format. Reviewers loved the concept. Our reps liked the new marketing approach. But the lack of compression caused hard disks to fill up quickly, and the software under-delivered. If only we could work out the kinks … .

Working out the kinks, however, did not jibe with “sell the shit.” Advanced planning, such as partnering with solutions providers, was getting lost under my task list. Prepping for trade shows, loading demo software, writing ad copy, following up on reviews in process, contacting sales reps, writing white papers and product sheets, testing software — it all became overwhelming. Strategy fell to the bottom of the list. I wasn’t a happy camper — more like an oppressed Sherpa.