170 Centimeters
Yoo Jae-won woke at dawn as usual and stepped into the bathroom, only to freeze. The pleasant drowsiness vanished in an instant. It wasn't because of a cockroach or a mouse that had suddenly appeared. The family home had gone far beyond remodeling—it had practically been rebuilt. Gone was the old bathroom with its cement stalls and a lone washbasin that required fetching water by hand. Now cold and hot water flowed freely, Italian tiles and fixtures lined the spacious room, and even a whirlpool tub had been installed. Thanks to Kim Mal-sook, his mother, who had begun rebuilding their countryside house the previous year, everything was spotless. She had modeled the renovation after a hotel they had stayed at during a trip to America. From the outside it looked like a red-brick house, but inside it felt like a hotel. As a result, cockroaches no longer crawled up from the drains.
“What the—!?”
Yoo Jae-won’s startled cry came from the reflection staring back at him in the full-length mirror.
“It’s a pimple.”
Right in the center of his forehead, the first place anyone’s eyes would land, a red pimple had popped up. A light touch sent a sharp sting through his skin. He had been meeting adults, speaking like an adult, and had forgotten his own age. It seemed his second puberty had finally arrived. Ever since entering middle school, Yoo Jae-won had avoided oily foods. Even his beloved fried chicken was limited to once a month, and he never touched ramen or chocolate. He washed his face religiously. He had believed that careful diet and hygiene would spare him any major trouble. His friends who came to the office for computer tutoring after school had started breaking out the year before, and now most of them carried pimples. Yet he himself had remained clear. He had thought diligent management would keep acne under control. Apparently not.
Because squeezing a pimple the wrong way could leave a scar for life, he quickly pulled his hand away.
“Well, did I at least grow taller?”
With everything so busy lately, he had forgotten to measure himself every day. A wall in the bathroom was marked in five-centimeter increments. He walked over and stood against it.
“Whoa!”
The gloom from the pimple disappeared at once. The number written at the top of his head was the one he had been longing for.
170 cm!
He had finally surpassed 170 centimeters. In his previous life he had eventually reached 173 cm, but only by the end of high school after growing slowly. This time he had hit 170 cm at a much faster pace. The pimple still annoyed him, but reaching 170 cm made for a refreshing start to the morning.
—Mirae Electronics—Toshiba Technology Exchange Negotiations Concluded!
By nine o’clock he had arrived at the office. When he picked up the morning newspaper from his desk, the front page was dominated by the story about Mirae Electronics. It was the same news Chairman Jeon Myeong-heon had called him about the previous evening. The chairman, who had scored a major victory, had recounted the tale with relish, and Yoo Jae-won had spent the call offering praise. The licensing terms for the flash memory technology were so favorable that even Yoo Jae-won admitted he could not have negotiated a better deal himself. Mirae Electronics had won a complete triumph.
The most critical clause—the royalty rate—was set at ten percent of sales. Considering that Mirae Electronics possessed no NAND flash memory technology of its own and would be receiving everything from Toshiba, ten percent was not excessive. Yet the rate would drop to five percent starting in 1998. Furthermore, royalties would decrease as production volume increased; once annual shipments reached five million chips, the rate would fall to one percent. Chairman Jeon Myeong-heon had argued that even at one percent, the total royalty amount would exceed what they had received before, and Toshiba’s representative had agreed. He had also pushed the principle of low margins and high volume, insisting that cheaper memory would drive greater consumption and ultimately higher profits, successfully locking in the one-percent royalty. The clause made it clear that Toshiba held the bleakest possible outlook on the future of NAND flash memory.
After all, Toshiba had invented flash memory yet never understood its potential applications, freely distributing the technology to anyone who asked. When they presented NAND flash memory at an IEEE conference, Intel had recognized its promise and requested a commercial research license. Toshiba had handed over all the information for a nominal fee. Not content with that, they had also transferred the technology to Ilseong Electronics around 1992 in the original timeline. Toshiba’s strategy was to let Intel and Ilseong pour money into development and marketing until the market grew large, then step in with their foundational patents and claim the lion’s share.
—Mirae Electronics—Toshiba Cross-License Agreement
The cross-license agreement illustrated this intent perfectly. Any new flash-memory-related technology Toshiba developed would automatically be available to Mirae Electronics, and vice versa. Toshiba clearly expected to simply take whatever application technologies Mirae Electronics created. Their lack of interest in developing advanced technology themselves was evident in their introduction of Matsuoka Fujio to Mirae Electronics. Matsuoka, a professor at Tohoku University, was the elite researcher who had created the world’s first NAND flash memory through industry-academia collaboration with Toshiba. Tanaka Hisashige, Toshiba’s representative, had praised Matsuoka as the foremost expert on flash memory and promised he would quickly resolve any technical issues. He had also pledged active cooperation in flash memory research. From Yoo Jae-won’s perspective, Toshiba had simply found it troublesome to fund Tohoku University’s research and had dumped the responsibility on Mirae Electronics. They clearly believed that once Mirae Electronics invested heavily in application and advanced technologies, Toshiba could acquire them for free through the cross-license.
“Thanks, you idiots.”
Toshiba probably thought they had tricked Mirae Electronics, but Yoo Jae-won could only feel grateful. Entrusting the negotiation to Chairman Jeon Myeong-heon had been an excellent decision.
Flash memory was the technology that would eventually replace hard disks and dominate the next-generation storage market from the early twenty-first century through the late 2030s, dramatically boosting computer performance. It was not limited to computers; flash memory became an essential storage component in mobile devices as well. Toshiba had practically given this technology to Mirae Electronics for a song—and even introduced the very professor who had invented it.
“Just because technology is shared doesn’t guarantee successful mass production!”
In semiconductor manufacturing, equipment was just as important as design. Even with a perfect blueprint, production was impossible without the right machinery. Semiconductor equipment was not a vending machine; the quality of the chips depended entirely on setup know-how and operating methods. The equipment was so sensitive that a minor factor like tilt could determine whether a company merely broke even or earned substantial profits.
“Flash memory is settled.”
Yoo Jae-won opened a file titled “MUST BUY” in his computer’s notepad. The list contained CCD sensors, CMOS sensors, flash memory, APUs, graphics libraries, touchscreens, photo printing, real-time developing, sticker photos, lossy compression technology, lithium-ion batteries, and even place names like the Uyuni Salt Flats. He drew a strikethrough across the flash memory entry. Two other items had already been crossed out: photo printing and lossy compression technology.
ID Investment’s Silicon Valley investments, which had begun with the acquisition of Microsoft, were still underway. Photo printing and lossy compression technologies had already been secured. The photo printing technology had come from a company Yoo Jae-won knew—Tectonic. It was the same firm that had caught his eye at the 1989 Comdex show where Egg PC and ID Office had been exhibited. They had boasted of reproducing full-color, 32-bit images using four inks, yet within a year they were on the verge of bankruptcy. No one was willing to pay $13,000 for a single A4 color printer. ID Investment had acquired all of Tectonic’s photo printing technology for a mere one million dollars.
Many had predicted that electronic documents would replace paper, and many still believed it. Reality proved otherwise. Even in the mid-twenty-first century, right up until Yoo Jae-won’s death in his previous life, paper remained widely used. Possessing photo printing technology capable of high-resolution output of both text and images meant one would never starve.
The next technology acquired was for compressing voice and video—commonly known as video codecs. Developed by a company called Indeo, it was naturally named the Indeo codec. While viewing video on computers was still unimaginable to most, research into related technologies was already active in Silicon Valley. ID Group had purchased fifty-one percent of Indeo’s shares for 2.5 million dollars and folded the company into ID Technology, keeping the existing management and corporate culture intact. The measure was necessary because Indeo was a venture with only nine employees, where management and development teams overlapped completely.
If Yoo Jae-won found the codec Indeo was developing unsatisfactory, he was prepared to develop one himself. Video and image files were crucial elements in a computer’s multimedia environment. The difference between a WWW document filled only with text and one that included appropriately placed images was obvious. Yet uncompressed image files consumed enormous storage space and placed heavy burdens on web servers. The ability to drastically reduce file sizes through lossy compression—imperceptible to human senses—was a tremendous advantage for transmission. Because lossless compression was also an indispensable technology, he had instructed Indeo to expand its workforce and develop both technologies simultaneously.
—New mail has arrived~!
An alert popped up while Yoo Jae-won was reviewing the checklist of future technologies. It was a new feature of the Nextcom connector. Not only mail but also message notifications appeared. Moreover, he could open a new tab to check mail directly without navigating to the inbox. For messages, a small pop-up window appeared so he could read them without interrupting his current work. All of it was his own creation. Korea’s Rodeo team was busy developing the next version of ID Office, while the Silicon Valley team had no spare capacity beyond completing Android 1.0. The development team acquired from Microsoft was still undergoing realignment and reassignment. Across the entire company, Yoo Jae-won was the only developer with any bandwidth left. Whenever he encountered inconvenience, he fixed it himself, and his most recent project had been the dedicated connection program for Nextcom. Every time he touched something, praise followed. Applying technologies that had already been validated by tens of millions of users in his previous life left no room for failure.
“Let’s see.”
The mail had come from Vincent Greenhill, vice president of ID Investment. It was lengthy. While expanding personnel to fulfill the investment bank’s core mission, he had sent a shortlist narrowed to twice the required number of candidates. The quality of applicants was markedly different from when ID Investment had first begun recruiting. Back then the pool had been filled with fresh graduates from business schools; now many had five or more years of Wall Street experience. Some even held MBAs—from the renowned Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and from Harvard. The caliber of applicants reflected how rapidly ID Investment’s reputation had risen on Wall Street, and Yoo Jae-won felt pleased.
Hiring required caution, so he had no intention of making decisions based solely on Vincent Greenhill’s report. The vice president had already filtered the candidates to twice the number needed and was not asking him to select the final hires yet. Once the résumés were digitized, they would be sent by email. Vincent also requested that Yoo Jae-won attend as many final interviews as possible. Naturally, Yoo Jae-won planned to participate. The investment manager position at ID Investment handled enormous sums; appointments could not be made without meeting the candidates in person.