A Case Study in Technological Capitalism: Part II. Under the Doctors.

                            

These bespoke machines were killer products in 1984

This is Part II of a 3 part series on a company I once worked for called "Xenotron"; this name was chosen by the start-up owner because it means in Latin "Strange Machine", and let's face it, the history of the world since the industrial revolution has been dominated by the advent of strange machines in large numbers; steam engines, telephones, production lines, cars, aircraft, tanks, bombs, television, computers etc. At the introduction of each have been innovators, entrepreneurs and speculators; all people who helped make the world what it is today.

The PDF's of Part I and Part II can be found here and here respectively. Below I reproduce the first section of the introduction to Part II.  My first blog post introducing this series can be found here. This story in part explains why I always say "I'm in favour of the Free Market, but with a 'But'....."

The story so far

In Part 1 of this history we saw how innovative technology company Xenotron had come to the fore in the printing industry as a result of it marketing a killer product: Viz: A unique combination of electronic hardware and software facilitating page and ad make up WYSIWYG style on a computer screen.; this device was called the Xenotron Video Composer or XVC. In 1976 when this proprietary product first appeared on the market nothing like it had been seen before. In Part I  I suggested that the introduction of Xenotron’s XVC  was comparable with the printing press revolution of 15^th century; well,  I like to think so as I had a small part the play in it! (No, make that a “tiny part”!). But at the very least the product was revolutionary and original enough to ensure Xenotron’s initial fast growth. However, by the mid-1980s the technological goal posts were on the move again: Xenotron’s growth meant that its organisational overheads were starting to balloon and the market had changed and slowed. In particular, on the horizon loomed the need to adopt standard platforms and become a systems integrator for printing companies who were now looking for single vendor solutions to system wide problems; this contrasted with Xenotron’s initial “one-trick-pony” XVC act (Although to be fair Xenotron did increase its repertoire of tricks).  Xenotron’s initial big profits were plummeting and just breaking-even became a challenge.  To meet this challenge a new trouble shooting CEO was called in, Danny Chapchal, who had a CV of nursing back to health ailing companies. One of his first acts was to sell Xenotron to the German printing company, Dr. –Ing. Rudolf Hell of Keil.

In this second part of the Xenotron adventure I will be looking at Xenotron’s progress under its two “doctors”:  namely, Danny Chapchal whose initials were appropriately “D R” and who was billed in Lithoprinter as a “Company Doctor” (See pages 7 & 8), and of course its buyer Dr. Hell.  Could these doctors rescue Xenotron from the bottomless pit of free market oblivion?  Well, it’s no spoiler to reveal that the answer to that question was, in the end, “No”. But spoiler or no spoiler I’m going to tell the story anyway because that story is less about the final outcome than the “how” and the “why” of that outcome. In particular, this story gives a perspective on what it’s like to be inside the ravages of a typically capitalist scenario of changing technology and changing markets. Here the demands of the market, demands sourced in human acquisitional motivations, often find themselves ill at ease with other human values rooted in human social needs. More comments on that subject can be found below.