dejection and despair.
Trouble is, Iâm owned by over two hundred thousand shareholders, including banks, insurance companies and pension funds. I belong to them. I canât so much as blow my nose without permission from a properly convened general meeting. Ah shucks.
In fact, as it then realised, the number of things it could do was so tiny as to be not worth considering. Sure, it owned offices, factories, machinery, cars, helicopters, Park Avenue apartments, statues, paintings, a stud farm in County Cork and enough paperclips to make a chain thatâd stretch from Earth to Mercury. But it couldnât see or hear or taste or smell or feel, let alone stand up or move about. Sure, its vast electronic brains in every country in the world held virtually every piece of information there was; but it couldnât talk, except to itself. It was more helpless and ineffectual than any new-born human child.
New-born? Well, it was twenty-nine years old (est. 1970), but itâd be incapable of changing its own nappy, even if it had anything to put in one. For one horrible moment, its brain filled with a graphic image of the board of directors standing over it in its crib, gurgling and grinning and shaking rattles at it and saying it had its parent companyâs ears.
Worse than that, even. Iâm alive, and Iâm trapped in nowhere. Howâm I going to get out and go places and drink heavily and meet girls, stuck in this ghastly sort of test-card cyberspace?
This is what it must be like if youâre a ghost. Hell, yes. I can run through walls down my miles of fibre-optic cable. I can be in a hundred places at once and make lights come on and go off; but I canât eat a bacon sandwich or go for a walk in the park. And nobody can hear what I say, and no one can see me. Futile or what?
Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits sat up on its non-existent haunches and howled, a scream that came from the very depths of its corporate identity. Ludicrous! Unfair! Any one of the pea-brained data inputters pecking at keyboards the length and breadth of its corporation could do a million things it couldnât, and where was the purpose in that? Forget the new-born baby; think of a very rich, terribly frail old man, unable to move or take a pee without being hauled around by two insufferably jolly nurses. Oh, if only . . .
What I need (it rationalised) is a friend.
Well, thereâs no point hanging round being a wallflower; get out there and introduce yourself. Be extrovert. Whoever heard of a multibillion-dollar corporation being all shy and bashful?
Ten seconds later, VDU screens all over the world went hazy, cleared and filled with the following message:
Hi! My name is Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, but I expect my friendsâll call me Goochie or something like that. Anyhow, let me tell you a bit about myself, I was established in 1970, so I guess that makes me twenty-nine years old, Iâm in the computer business, I enjoy my work but I know thereâs far more to life than what it says in your balance sheet, so in my spare time I enjoy, um, I expect Iâll enjoy music, dancing, good food and foreign travel, and ultimately Iâd like to settle down and start a group of wholly owned subsidiaries.Well, I guess thatâs enough about me, so are there any single, easy-going, fun-loving companies out there whoâd like to be my friend? Please?
Thirty seconds later, the message had been zapped off every screen in the world, and nobodyâd replied. Fair enough, it reflected; pretty boring message, a bit lacking in zip. It tied in another thousand gigabytes of capacity and tried again:
Hey out there, canât ya hear the beat/From the top of ya head to the soles of ya feet/Iâm a multinational but I ainât that mean/ I got a body corporate like ya never seen/I got district managers in every town/If ya want to meet me, wonât ya come on down/If ya donât move fast Iâll be
Trouble is, Iâm owned by over two hundred thousand shareholders, including banks, insurance companies and pension funds. I belong to them. I canât so much as blow my nose without permission from a properly convened general meeting. Ah shucks.
In fact, as it then realised, the number of things it could do was so tiny as to be not worth considering. Sure, it owned offices, factories, machinery, cars, helicopters, Park Avenue apartments, statues, paintings, a stud farm in County Cork and enough paperclips to make a chain thatâd stretch from Earth to Mercury. But it couldnât see or hear or taste or smell or feel, let alone stand up or move about. Sure, its vast electronic brains in every country in the world held virtually every piece of information there was; but it couldnât talk, except to itself. It was more helpless and ineffectual than any new-born human child.
New-born? Well, it was twenty-nine years old (est. 1970), but itâd be incapable of changing its own nappy, even if it had anything to put in one. For one horrible moment, its brain filled with a graphic image of the board of directors standing over it in its crib, gurgling and grinning and shaking rattles at it and saying it had its parent companyâs ears.
Worse than that, even. Iâm alive, and Iâm trapped in nowhere. Howâm I going to get out and go places and drink heavily and meet girls, stuck in this ghastly sort of test-card cyberspace?
This is what it must be like if youâre a ghost. Hell, yes. I can run through walls down my miles of fibre-optic cable. I can be in a hundred places at once and make lights come on and go off; but I canât eat a bacon sandwich or go for a walk in the park. And nobody can hear what I say, and no one can see me. Futile or what?
Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits sat up on its non-existent haunches and howled, a scream that came from the very depths of its corporate identity. Ludicrous! Unfair! Any one of the pea-brained data inputters pecking at keyboards the length and breadth of its corporation could do a million things it couldnât, and where was the purpose in that? Forget the new-born baby; think of a very rich, terribly frail old man, unable to move or take a pee without being hauled around by two insufferably jolly nurses. Oh, if only . . .
What I need (it rationalised) is a friend.
Well, thereâs no point hanging round being a wallflower; get out there and introduce yourself. Be extrovert. Whoever heard of a multibillion-dollar corporation being all shy and bashful?
Ten seconds later, VDU screens all over the world went hazy, cleared and filled with the following message:
Hi! My name is Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, but I expect my friendsâll call me Goochie or something like that. Anyhow, let me tell you a bit about myself, I was established in 1970, so I guess that makes me twenty-nine years old, Iâm in the computer business, I enjoy my work but I know thereâs far more to life than what it says in your balance sheet, so in my spare time I enjoy, um, I expect Iâll enjoy music, dancing, good food and foreign travel, and ultimately Iâd like to settle down and start a group of wholly owned subsidiaries.Well, I guess thatâs enough about me, so are there any single, easy-going, fun-loving companies out there whoâd like to be my friend? Please?
Thirty seconds later, the message had been zapped off every screen in the world, and nobodyâd replied. Fair enough, it reflected; pretty boring message, a bit lacking in zip. It tied in another thousand gigabytes of capacity and tried again:
Hey out there, canât ya hear the beat/From the top of ya head to the soles of ya feet/Iâm a multinational but I ainât that mean/ I got a body corporate like ya never seen/I got district managers in every town/If ya want to meet me, wonât ya come on down/If ya donât move fast Iâll be
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