It’s All About Power - Inventing the PC - page 89

sibilities for product development. After all it was he who, as
the majority shareholder, had the most to gain by bringing the
MCM /70 swiftly to production readiness.
Kutt objected to strict restrictions on the use of additional
funds, knowing that the largest single expense was employee
salaries. However, his attempt at controlling this expenditure
by eliminating non-essential jobs was, according to Kutt, re-
jected by the board of directors.
Robertson's 14 March letter to Kutt also confirmed that Kutt
was in accord with the suggestion that Bruce C. Wallace be
appointed to fill the vacancy on the board of directors. Wal-
lace was not a stranger to Kutt nor to anybody else at MCM .
In 1972, he was taken out of semi-retirement and parachuted
into MCM territory by the outside shareholders. According to
Kutt, he wasn't an MCM employee, he was just a person associ-
ated with the company's most important financial backers. “He
was never on staff,” said Kutt. “We never paid him anything.
I just let him come in.” His initially peculiar presence at MCM
became, in time, a part of its corporate culture. There is no
explicit evidence to support the hypothesis that Wallace's in-
itial assignment was to gather intelligence on MCM 's activities.
However, Wallace's constant presence at MCM soon began to
produce results in the form of alliances with some of the MCM
employees. According to Kutt, these alliances played a signifi-
cant role in his own power struggle with the outside sharehold-
ers and, in some important cases, would misguide the board of
directors in their decision-making process. “They believed him
more than they ever should,” concluded Kutt.
Wallace became an MCM director on 2 April 1974. Soon after
Wallace's appointment, it became completely evident to Kutt
that his own control over the board of directors had been lost to
the outside shareholders. The financial situation of the company
wasn't improving, and the company was burning money faster
than Kutt was able to supply it. The beginning of volume pro-