The Transition

About two months before UMAX Computer Corp bit the dust, Bruce told me the big secret about the company to which he would flee, and he asked if I wouldn't mind joining him. Clearly, our jobs were fading into the darkness that was Apple Licensing, so an offer of a job working for Bruce with all of the stuff that would or would not be true was sort of ideal, since I didn't have to go looking for anything. Laziness would be my undoing, or would it? Looking back, I am convinced that this was perhaps one of my most educational learning experiences since moving to Silly Valley.

The story really begins the day I finally got Bruce to tell me what the name of the company was. Until that day, I only knew there were plans afoot, and that the train wreck that was UCC was getting ever-closer to that spot on the tracks that would be its undoing. I had convinced Bruce to tell me where it was that he was going to meet these people, at which point I actually drove to the area and found out what the major companies were on the intersection. Not Hyundai, not Hitachi, but Philips it would be.

I had decided to take a month off from UMAX for various reasons, the chief one being that the combination of SCM Microsystems, Netscape, and UCC without any real vacation between them had left me frustrated and weak. Without really planning for it, I had left myself time to take the next step toward working at Philips, in the form of a trip to Anaheim, California, where the annual Society for Information Display show was being held. I would learn later that there are actually a few SID shows at various places and times, but since I knew nothing of SID or much else, this seemed like a good way to launch into the Philips world. Prior to the trip, Bruce had mentioned a few things about LCDs and he had wanted me to do some web research on them. He had also informed me that a person from long ago would also be part of this team.

Well, I arrived in Anaheim, I saw the show, and I met up with Brad, of SuperMac fame, and we took a moment to reflect on what we had seen thus far. We had both worked at SuperMac, and Brad had later worked at Diamond, I had worked at Truevision, and we were both familiar enough with displays to know that using them was about as into displays as we wanted to be. In fact, I recall we both agreed that while LCDs certainly looked cool, neither of us would really be interested in making something silly like a monitor out of them. We would be meeting the guy who was bringing Bruce onboard, and so with our solidarity between us, we ventured to the suite to learn more.

Matt was a radius guy. Radius had purchased SuperMac after I was laid off, which is one of the places (perhaps the first one) where Bruce, of SuperMac, and Matt crossed paths. Radius and SuperMac were thus the parents of this offspring, made up of the three of us (Bruce, Brad, myself) with SuperMac scars, and a fourth, Fran, fresh from radius via a short stint at UCC. The foreshadowing at this point should have been mindnumbing, but we pressed on.

Matt had vision, he had a certain energy, and he seemed to have the power to enable some fairly creative ideas and projects, all of which Bruce was ready to jump on. Looking back, the projects mentioned that day have all become products of varying success in the marketplace, perhaps because we never actually worked on any of them, but at the time, it all sounded very interesting, since the ideas were technologies that would take advantage of LCDs, while the possibility that our main project might be making LCD desktop computer monitors never came up.

We left that meeting with Matt feeling fairly upbeat about the possibilities. Bruce, Brad, and I went to dinner at a nice restaurant and toasted what we had hoped would be a fine undertaking. In well-known Bruce fashion, things began moving quickly from this point on, as offer letters were drafted and signed, the Philips HR department was made aware of these new employees (yes, it was done in Bruce order, as always), Fran came on board to start the wheels of progress, and tickets for a trip to Europe were purchased. Our first day on the job, June 15, 1998, would be spent in the air on the way to the Philips fatherland, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

An Aside

At this point I must get a bit more detailed than is probably necessary in order that I might poke fun at Bruce about this little distraction. You see, I prefer to travel in comfortable clothing, and in fact was quite used to flying internationally in jeans, hanes undershirt, thick socks, sneakers, and an Eddie Bauer thermal sweater with buttons. Not too warm, but warm if I needed, etc. Bruce admonished me for not "Dressing Up" for the flight, and I dismissed his criticisms as I so often do.

On passing through the passenger inspection point in the international terminal of SFO, I was stopped and my stachel was checked for explosive residues with some chemical paper. Standard, apparently, as the zippers and other metal pieces sometimes retain this evidence where this is some to be retained. Not knowing Philips all that well, I had not prepared any explosives for the trip, but I did get a short lecture on how a better-dressed passenger is less-likely to be stopped.

We stopped in Amsterdam at Schiphol airport to change planes, at which point Brad was checked and the inspectors there asked him to open his brushed-metal brief case for a look. Brad was dressed more nicely than I was, but Bruce still pointed out the fact that he was probably bringing too much attention on himself with his casual dress.

The lesson was to be delivered at the Eindhoven airport, however, as we deplaned and entered the luggage claim area. We each had enough luggage for our two-week trip to Eindhoven and Redhill, England, and Bruce had his traditional hard bag to carry, which meant he was not particularly effortless in his gait. Perhaps it was this fact, or perhaps it was that he looked generally confused now that we were "in country," or perhaps it was that Brad and I had our passports out and he did not, but we both took a certain pleasure from the complete search that Bruce would be forced to endure as we crossed the threashold between luggage area and airport exit. So close we were, and as Bruce was being asked about how many squares of toilet paper he used during his last visit to a lavatory, Brad and I were asked if we wanted to be next. The answer was "No" and we quickly flashed our passports and waited outside for Bruce. I told him he was probably overdressed.

Going Dutch

I had been to France and Japan before, so I was familiar enough with the fact that being American meant I knew nothing about what to do outside of America. As such, I was essentially along for the ride. Brad, though, had actually lived in Germany and Europe for a number of years and had, in fact, met his wife there. Bruce had traveled around quite a bit, most recently for SCM Microsystems, but Brad was still the most at ease with the goings on. We journeyed in our Mercedes taxi from the Eindhoven airport to our hotel, the Coulsa Houva (the correct spelling escapes me as of this writing), which was much more pleasant than the "farmhouse hotel" I was picturing from that description. It was actually quite serene there, and Brad and I would enjoy that serenity for several days, where Bruce would only be spending a night or two there. More Bruce planning.

Well, that hotel was about 30 minutes from the NatLab, the place where our trip to Philips was really to begin. Each morning for a week we awoke for the country drive, but the first morning was particularly interesting, since neither Brad nor I knew for certain what we were walking in to. Bruce had already been to this lab at least once before. We arrived, checked in with the guards at the front gate, and proceeded to the WAY building, where we would meet the various members of the extended cast of characters.

WAY Not Silicon Valley

It so happens that many of the people that we met in Holland were quite pleasant, helpful, outgoing, and happy the talk about their work at Philips, the number of bicycles they owned, or the fact that they could speak at least four lanuages to our one. No so true of the people in WAY, where there was a sort of political battle going on about LCD panels and what Philips should have been doing about them. We began by meeting a large number of people with extremely Dutch names which will not be spelled herein, we toured the LCD fabrication facility that they had there on the site, we had some Dutch food, we enjoyed much more coffee than one should be allowed to, and we discovered that cold, non-sparkling water is a rare commodity in Eindhoven. Several days later, we had met various folks, been to a couple of Philips facilities, moved to the Holiday Inn in Downtown Eindhoven (there is such a place!), and Brad and I even managed a trip south to Mastricht on the weekend.

To make an already-long story less so, suffice to say that we, as Americans, were stepping into a bit of a tense situation, made more tense by the fact that Matt, also American, had become The Boss just a few months earlier, which meant that all of the people in the WAY area having anything to do with LCDs were now quite curious as to their futures at Philips. To add insult to injury, Brad, Bruce, and I are touring the place as heir-apparent to the LCD business (so they probably thought) quite obviously oblivious to the technology, process, and potential of LCDs in general (so they thought, and so they were not completely off the mark). It was right about now we met Erik.

At this WAY building, and allegedly at all such buildings in Europe, people get actual offices with actual doors and windows and such, which is completely alien a concept to Silicon Valley alumni. Smoking in those offices is also allowed and probably expected, which took us quite by surprise as Brad and I met with Erik in what seemed like a nice-sized office space. It began to shrink as the smoke seemed to force more and more of the fresh air out of the room, and it shrunk faster still with each Drum cigarette Erik experly rolled. He proceeding to interview Brad and me about our experience, our interests, our abilities, and so on. Later, we would learn that Erik was to report to Brad in the new org chart, and while that fact made the scene that much more entertaining in hindsight, we both couldn't help but feel as Bruce did at Eindhoven airport after the thurough inspection we had received.

Redhill, England

About a mile from Gatwick airport in Southern England is the Redhill research facility, one of many such facilities littering the world and spending through billions of Euros even as I type this. We flew from Eindhoven to Heathrow, through, and took a rather interesting car ride in a Jaguar limosien. The driver was a bit odd, though his knowledge of the various automobiles on the road around us was interesting. It was at this time that I saw my first identifiable Lotus Elise, and I liked it (having seen the first one in Eindhoven and not knowing at all what it was).

The people at Redhill are much more fun, much more excited about their work, and quite eager to share their knowlege about the various fields in which they endeavor. Our mission was to find out just what was happening with Philips research in the areas of display technology, and the WAY building at the NatLab and two groups at Redhill were the beginnings of our quest for this knowledge. Suffice to say that this group was more fun, and that I found Redhill to be a nicer place to visit than the NatLab.

Back in the USA, The Beatings Begin

Once we returned to Philips Flat Display Systems headquarters in San Jose, Bruce, Brad, Fran, and I all began to realize that working for a company as large and as politically diverse as Philips would be a challenge. To start things off, the phone numbers that had been reserved in a block of 20 with the phone company where never actually reserved with the phone company. The Philips phone tech, who admitted herself that she was never trained for that task, had promised that they were reserved, got internal DID extensions installed, and business cards printed before she ever checked to see that the numbers were already allocated and in fact hooked up to a company called GASonic, several blocks from the Philips building.

Between these sorts of phone snafus, the complete idiocy of the Philips IT department (which was outsourced to an international company owned by Philips, headquartered in... you guessed it, Eindhoven), and the political mess that was brewing inside our building (and, as I would later learn, througout Philips Components and even into Philips Semiconductors), we found quite quickly that the trip would be uphill both ways, through snow and sleet, and with people shooting at us.

On the positive side, when UCC finally did shut down, several of the people I had come to enjoy working with were able to swing over to work at Philips, which ended up being a double-edged sword for some. At the time, though, now September 1998, things began looking up as our group gained some mass and our thoughts of innovation began to enter the realm of possibility. So positive was our group, in fact, that Bruce was able to convince his management that Philips should allow him to invest in an intern to help the group manage its spending and other needs. That intern was Oum, whom my readers may know was my girlfriend and now my fiance.

Suddenly, we had a real engineering organization in a building populated almost completely by HR, Accounting, Finance, Business Development, and general Business people. They were wholly unfamiliar with the dress code, hours of operation, and general mode of operation of an engineering organization, especially one that was made up of so many people who knew each other so well. Almost immediately, there was a rift between US and THEM, and it was a rift that would be bridged with smiles and handshakes, but which would continue to widen.

Innovate or Whatever, But Make Money

The premise that drove the formation of our group, called Software & Electronics, was that Philips wanted to take these expensive LCD panels and integrate other electronics into them to make a component that was more attractive as an integrated assembly, rather than a raw device that was expensive and which still required the customers to integrate themselves. A pretty simple proposition, actually, and since Philips had so much potential in its research labs and other product divisions (especially Semiconductor), the possibilities seemed endless.

Everyone in the management chain had bought into the concept of a group of engineers in Silicon Valley that would have the geographic locality to talk to American businesses about partnerships and deals, as well as the ability to operate at Silicon Valley clock speeds. Europe, it seems, runs at a nice, steady burn as far as Philips is concerned. We had our work cut out for us, but we in S&E were seasoned veterans of the Silicon Valley Way and were ready to go despite the political rumblins, bad IT and phone support, and various other problems.

It was at this point that the politics overtook reality. Only four months into our existence, we learned the cold hard truth of doing business inside Philips. Where Bruce had promised "The small, tight-knit group and innovative possibilities of a startup inside the protective and resource-rich environment of a huge company," we were learning that even a young group like ours would have to pay tribute. No free rides, you see, which I believe- and this is my opinion- was brought on by the cost of this innovation we were proposing. The fatal flaw in The Plan was that S&E was a P&L, not an R&D operation, and Philips had some pretty optimistic projections for our P that were going to be outstripped by our L if we continued along this expensive innovation pathway. Add to this the fact that our lofty goals of innovation were threatening Philips Seminconductors, and you get the beginning of the end.

The End, as we decided it was in hindsight, was the proclamation that our group, which had started down the road of innovation, espousing the virtue of Philips Integration to foster Customer Differentiation, would instead be relegated to the creation and production of low-cost desktop LCD monitor controller electronics and software to sell to existing and potential customers. We had no dedicated sales people, so we depended completely on an existing account in Europe that was built around an extremely overpriced and sub-quality piece of electronics designed by some folks in the WAY building... lead by the guy who rolled Drums with both hands.

Kevin and I got on a plane to Eindhoven to learn whatever we needed to learn about this existing board so that we could decide how best to move forward. Whilst in Europe, we took a day trip to Hamburg to visit Philips Semiconductors (one of many sites), where a group of engineers where designing the next generation in Philips LCD driver electronics. We got a quick rundown on the device, exchanged business cards, and arranged for a meeting with their sales person in San Jose within a week or so. We ended that trip with a fine visit to the Redhill facility, which I still, to this day, miss doing.

The Hamburglers Strike

We met with the sales person from the Philips Semiconductor group working on the scaler part we were interested in. It seemed to fit our requirements as a transitional platform to take the current board to its EOL while we continued along with a better solution at the same price. Our group tended to be performance oriented, while we should have been cost oriented, and this is probably another factor that lead to our early demise.

The salesman upheld the tradition and told us precisely what we wanted to hear. We had some direction from upper management to take advantage of the resources of Philips and to use as much Philips technology as possibile in this design, so we listed as the salesman