It’s All About Power - Inventing the PC - page 77

committed to only one product - the basic MCM /70. Now
is the time to fundamentally examine from the marketing,
manufacturing, and financing perspectives, our business
strategy … To carry on with TCF at this time … means
risking our whole future for the sake of $35,000. Strategic
decision-making for an ostensible multi-million dollar
company should not be unduly influenced by $35,000.
Day's criticism went further, questioning the entire strategy
of entering an established business systems market, a strategy
which, in his opinion, was dangerous and unjustified in the
case of MCM - a company that was yet to introduce its first
product, and that for a different market niche. He reminded
company managers that the marketing strategy that included
the small business systems was formed in the early 1970s when
“our expectations were that the MCM /70 processor could be
used in these systems and that we would be currently selling
1,000 MCM /70s a month and wondering what to do with all
the money pouring in, but the expectations were wrong and the
strategy is obsolete.”
In the end, Day's memo didn't have much effect on the ter-
mination of the TCF contract. To the best of the author's know-
ledge, the TCF system was never developed by MCM , but the
MCM /170 concept reemerged a few years later as the MCM /800
computer.
There was no doubt within MCM 's managerial ranks that a
successful company ought to be always looking ahead to its
next product and that the MCM /70 would have to be replaced,
sooner rather than later, by a faster computer. Reports coming
out from the National Computer Conference, which took place
in Chicago in May 1974, clearly indicated that Intel's new and
fast microprocessor - the 8080 - had already started to show
up in computer hardware. R 2 E 's Micral S, exhibited during the