The 10mm Compromise
Ten millimeters thick definitely looked a little clunky, but now wasn’t the time to obsess over shaving it down. Henry balanced the crude prototype on his palm and turned it over, inspecting every angle.
The button click and the LCD’s characteristic ghosting were more than acceptable given the technological limits of 1979. They weren’t just tolerable—they were genuinely impressive. Still, that unavoidable ten-millimeter thickness kept nagging at him. Even though the design matched the mock-up perfectly, the temporary plastic and imperfect finish made the whole thing look dull and heavy in his eyes.
It’s not like there’s no way around it. If I mill out the board and embed the mercury cells, I could get it under six millimeters…
But that would send process complexity through the roof and spike the defect rate. This wasn’t just a cost issue; it would be self-sabotage that crippled initial supply volumes. On top of that, embedded batteries would mean a disposable machine with no way to replace the power source. Pure stupidity.
Henry needed to dominate the market well before Nintendors launched their Watch & Game next April. So he decided to save the thickness issue as ammunition for an “upgrade version.”
There’s a ninety-nine percent chance Nintendors won’t even make their April release, but still. Better block that last zero-point-one percent.
Thanks to Henry steamrolling every obstacle like a bulldozer and personally directing development, progress had been near lightspeed. In just two months they already had a working—if ugly—prototype capable of running games. The CMOS microprocessor, the era’s slimmest epoxy-resin board, the sound chip, and speaker had all been selected in a flash. Rubber contact switches were off-the-shelf due to the tight schedule, but the overall blueprint was flawless. LCD pattern design had already moved into field testing.
Production line adjustments and mass-production validation still remained, yet in Henry’s mind the factory was already humming. He refused to compromise on design, so the molds for the body and buttons had been ordered even before the deal with Sharp. The delay wasn’t just about shrinkage adjustments. The real reason was the material Henry had stubbornly demanded.
“I insisted on chrome-molybdenum steel—the stuff they use in aircraft engines—so of course it’s taking longer. But once the mold is right, we can stamp tens of thousands of units with zero deviation in quality.”
Henry murmured to himself while reviewing the schedule on his desk.
“When the master mold arrives, I’ll ship it straight to Japan and fire up the Sharp consignment line. Since we’re securing volume faster than planned, we can send everything by sea instead of expensive air freight. Distribution is the only thing left. We’ll flood the entire U.S. market the moment we unveil at next January’s Las Vegas CES. For Japan, we’ll aim for a simultaneous launch depending on how things look. Europe… well, I don’t feel like running around myself. When the distributors line up, I’ll just pick the best one.”
The real problem was money. Henry had originally planned to begin mass production after January. That was when the silver investment would bear fruit, and he intended to inject a portion of those astronomical profits into Enjoy to fuel the lines.
For that grand plan, he had dumped thirty-nine million of the forty-million-dollar loan straight into the silver market furnace. The remaining one million was supposed to cover labor for both companies, mold costs, and his own luxurious lifestyle until January.
Then the variables appeared. The bizarre partnership with Sharp that began almost the day the company was founded, the unexpectedly competent veterans from ARF Electronics, and above all, the insane drive of a mad talent named Marcus Wayne had combined to finish development at the speed of light.
Damn. These guys work too well. Isn’t it common sense for salarymen to stretch things out until the deadline?
Of course, Henry completely failed to acknowledge that he himself had ignored every complicated issue of cost and profitability and simply bulldozed forward yelling “Just do it!”
The standard playbook for 1970s electronics launches was simple: show the prototype at January’s Las Vegas CES to test the waters, wow buyers at February’s New York Toy Fair to secure pre-orders, then use that money to manufacture. Production costs back then were astronomically high compared to later eras, so no manufacturer—no matter how confident—would gamble on building inventory without orders in hand.
It’s moving way too fast. The production line is already waiting, but we’re out of bullets. Borrow from the bank again? Or… hmm.
Henry fiddled with the crude prototype a few more times, then set it down without regret. The attached document carried a short, sharp note: “Afterimage issue must be resolved.”
Afterimage problem must be resolved
Instead of signing the approval line, Henry left only the pointed criticism and stepped out of the room. He patted Marcus on the shoulder—“Hang in there a little longer”—then headed upstairs. Money wasn’t printing itself yet, but when it came to wrestling with serious cash shortages, the cool air of an investment firm beat the soldering-smell of a game console company any day.
...
Up on the investment floor, Henry approached Charles first, exchanged a light greeting, and asked for an update.
“Silver has broken through nine-forty, boss! Following the three-times fixed pyramiding rule, we’ve increased the position to three thousand ninety contracts. Are you really… planning to add more from here?”
“Yes. Maintain the triple leverage strictly and keep buying on strength. Stay glued to the market.”
Since building the position at an average of eight-seventy on June twenty-second, the price had climbed to nine-forty. Liquidating now would still net over nine million in profit, but to Henry that was pocket change.
Minimum thirty dollars. And that’s being extremely conservative.
Watching Charles return to his desk, Henry stepped into his own office. He was short on ammunition for immediate mass production. Take out another bank loan, or dip into the family trust?
After ten minutes of intense thought, he picked up the phone and called Gilberto.
“Boss, where do you want me to rob this time?”
“Has investigating with me become your hobby?”
“Do you even know how many companies were on that list I gave you? And back then we were still hiring—”
Henry let out a dry laugh at Gilberto’s shameless teasing, then cut off the whining and got to the point.
“Enough. We’re not looking at new companies right now. How’s the situation with the British The Times? Is there any way to kill the contract?”
The venerable British newspaper his biological parents had tried to acquire was a literal time bomb. A miraculous operation where papers flew off the shelves yet the company still lost money. It was suffering a terminal case of the famous “British disease”—high costs, low efficiency. The militant union had been on strike for over a year, blocking even basic publication. Debt was mountainous, and the due-diligence report made it clear: the more they printed, the deeper they sank into the red.
No matter how much family honor was involved, Henry had zero desire to shoulder this headache.
“Well… Madam set the breakup penalty extremely high back then, fearing the Canadian Thomson family might change their minds. Canceling now would mean throwing real money out the window.”
“Sigh… Just how obsessed was she with the name ‘Times’…”
Bart had told him his mother had been pathologically fixated on that name while alive. Both the One Times Square building registered under Henry’s name and the acquisition of The Times were products of that obsession.
He had been willing to let it slide as filial duty, but the solutions listed in the report were ridiculous. True to the 1970s, many of the suggestions were violently illegal—removing people and the like—but even the “legal” ones were insane. They involved introducing computer typesetting on a shop floor where Molotov cocktails were flying, building secret factories to dodge the union, and constructing an entire security system to counter logistics union interference.
When he read the final recommendation—that they might need to acquire a logistics company just to avoid unions that refused to handle cargo from “companies where unions are striking”—he nearly hurled the documents across the room.
Who knew Britain had such fucked-up laws that you can’t even report the unions? No wonder they openly run wild in this lawless hellscape.
He could steel himself for public backlash and crush the militant union entirely. But the problem was, again, money. The instant those workers were fired, the severance and pensions would total one hundred million pounds—roughly two hundred twenty million dollars. Even if they compromised and kept publishing, they would still be stuck carrying three thousand useless printing staff.
That bloated labor cost was exactly why this prestigious paper selling over five hundred thousand copies daily couldn’t turn a profit.
Labor costs are insanely high too. There’s seriously no answer here. Fuck. British disease. I only ever saw it in YouTube shorts. Never imagined I’d be living it.
Even if they poured their souls into new technology, additional factory investment, and acquiring a logistics firm to normalize operations, projected annual profit was still under ten million dollars. A return rate with no clear timeline for investment recovery—management suicide.
To Henry, such pocket change held no value beyond the prestige of owning a media outlet. And if an American who wasn’t even British jumped into the mess, he would eat curses from both unions and the press, suffer endless headaches, and end up with nothing but red ink on the books.
Besides, once the internet arrived in the future, the whole industry would collapse into a sunset sector and the value would plummet. Embracing this colossal pile of shit just to own one speaker that might last twenty years at most was pure insanity.