NEC Australia Pty Ltd

I direct the U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center.

We produce this series with support from our member companies, which include Bridgestone Corporation, Brilliant Hope, Inc., Mitsubishi Research Institute, NEC Corporation, and Mitsumeikan University.

So I'm very happy that you can all come today and I hope you'll plan to stay after our formal session is over.

We will have some refreshments outside and be sure and meet our panelists.

study of this question.

And so I went and worked for a Japanese technology company, NEC Corporation.

You know, it's kind of one of the, they had this program where Japanese companies had grown very rapidly, but they had problems managing their overseas operations.

And so the then leader of NEC had this idea.

Secondly, we looked at this and said, this is a truly unique technology business that is critical to the broader technology, technology ecosystem.

And the third takeaway was it doesn't seem like anyone else can actually own this business.

So, you know, Any trust was going to make it very difficult for any technology company to own it.

Japanese government didn't really want a foreign company to own it.

And he thought that he might be able to use a computer in some way in his writing, not necessarily to generate his writing for him, but just to aid him in his writings.

So he bought a PC-6001, early hobbyist computer from NEC, Nippon Electric, because he was good at math and logic, very quickly got into fiddling around, came with a book on how to program in BASIC.

And he got very interested in programming in BASIC.

Once he'd mastered that and realized how slow and limited it was, he got himself another book on how to do Z80, which was the processor at the heart of the system, Z80 assembly programming.

Got tired of that and started creating his own programs, mostly based on the hit coin-op games at the time.

He was also converting programs from other systems.

So the Sharp MZ-80 was in some ways a better computer for games, but he had a NEC PC-8001, so he would convert the MZ-80 programs into PC-8001 programs.

He created his own clones of games like Space Panic and Scramble and some of the other hit games of the time and started selling these games to some of the magazines.

He began his career at IBM before joining Visionaire as senior vice president, helping take the company public on the NASDAQ in 1995.

Afterward, he went on to serve as the VP of Software Products at Xerox, and then as CTO and Executive Vice President at NEC Packard Bell, one of the world's largest PC manufacturers at that time.

He then founded MIT Media Lab Europe.

a $40 million joint venture between MIT and the Irish government, before taking on the CEO role at Cipher PLC, a UK public company where he led a full restructuring that required selling 11 of the company's 13 operating businesses.

The rest of us, not so much.

Interesting.

And when it came to working across IBM, Visionary, Xerox, NEC, Packard, Bell, what were some of the similarities you saw in these companies in the ways they did it right and didn't do it right? Because some of these companies have survived.

Some of them have gone on to not survive or not do so well.