Case Study of Curiosity PC Business (C07)

This is a true story dating back 32 years ago turning tears to smiles. It is about how curiosity led a professional engineer in Wellington to create a personal computer (PC) manufacturing business in Auckland. The business is still on-going today (2024-04) known as Compucon New Zealand with no signs of stopping. For sure, the initial years were blood and tears. Cash ran out in a year. Curiosity, the foundation stone, was the only thing thriving. It led to passion and perseverance. These virtual assets have worked and created miracles one after another. The company attained ISO-9001 management quality certification in 1995 and bought the current building in 1996. This story highlights how curiosity, passion, and perseverance tamed three impediments among others that would otherwise bring the business to its knees.

Impediment #1. The NZ business environment has never supported industrial businesses of the assembly type. For example, all car assembly businesses stopped in the 80’s when the border was open to overseas imports. The same fate should apply to PC assembly. Not true. Car assembly was a licensed operation of proprietary brands. The PC industry was different. It thrived all over the world due to the emerging business concept of vertical collaboration via open interfacing standards. The most publicized example is Wintel- the collaboration of Intel processors and Microsoft Windows. Many people loved it (though more people hated it for other reasons). Compucon did not need to imitate any PC brands. We focused on the business and professional markets and defined fitness for purpose as our design guideline. We survived the test of time for attaining higher quality and reliability than imported brands.

Impediment #2. 80% of small businesses failed in 5 years statistically because small businesses do not have enough resources to be as resilient as big businesses. The tide lifts and sinks all boats. Most PC assembling operations have ceased business over the years due to market saturation. Why did Compucon survive the receding tide whilst others did not? A deep pocket has never been the privilege of Compucon. Curiosity, passion, and perseverance were the primary supports. They collectively led to world class system design and quality, and responsive peer support services. Smiles.

Impediments #3. A smart phone can do a lot of things these days. Why would people need PC at all? A smart phone has severe limits on physical size, weight, and power. A desktop or rack-mounted PC does not have. A Compucon PC can be loaded with tens of HDD/SSD/Express drives, its computational performance can be boosted by a couple of GPUs, and it can have a large footprint of main memory like 128GB to support big data processing. The scope of PC applications continues to be widely open for the foreseeable future. Smiles again.

Curiosity, passion, and perseverance are the foundation stones for supporting a long-lasting business even in adverse operating environments. This statement is not limited to PC manufacturing but applicable to all production and service operations. Curiosity leads to visioning as well. There are plenty of emerging PC technologies if we care to see. Exciting examples are Processing in Memory, Multi-modal Neural Processors, and Quantum Computing. If Compucon can do it, you can too. Why not?