★ PEOPLES ★ CLIVE AND KICKING (NEW COMPUTER EXPRESS) ★ |
| Clive and kicking (New Computer Express) |
Sir Clive Sinclair virtually invented the British home compu ter industry. The 80s were a bad time for him with the ill-fated C5 car and QL computer. But, as Mike Scialom reports, he's back in business... Accordmg to whether or not ho has a decent product available in the marketplace, Sir Clive Sinclair is either a revered genius or a self-deluding nutter. He has produced a string of gadgets which veer from the laughably pathetic to the awesomely successful, including the first pocket calculator, the Black Watch digital wristwatch, pocket TV, C5 'electric car' and the first affordable satellite TV dish. In the computer world Sir Clive is credited with starting the home computer revolution with the ZX81 and bestselling Spectrum, plus the optimistic (but not fully developed) QL, to today's respectable Z88. Whichever way it is, Sir Clive is at least a selfinvented man. His rise to become Britain's foremost computing legend began in his teens. There was little to suggest that he would become an entrepreneur. His lower middle class roots offered few obvious outlets for his interest in electrical gadgets, which started in his teens. He was supported by his dad - an electronics expert who used to work with his son in his London office up until about 1936 At 17 the young Sinclair became a journalist with Practical Wireless, a job he held for several years with some success. But what he really wanted to do was start his own company. In 1962 he took the leap and founded Sinclair Radionics, building and supplying radio kits to enthusiasts. He opened with, one of the tricks that was to become a hallmark two decades later, bringing both success and disgust from his customers. He took a quarter page advertising his products mail order, and made these sales his main source of income. To be fair, there was little alternative, but one of the things the young Clive learned was that he didn't have to buy parts until he knew the level of demand - and if that meant keeping people waiting, then so be it. This was later to be at least part of the reason for his fall from grace in the mid-80's, which eventually led to his name being bought by Amstrad's Alan Sugar, thereby replacing Sinclair as Britain's foremost computer king. In the 60's and 70's Sinclair produced the world's first pocket calculators and digital watches ahead of the Japanese. But he sold the business when it ran into difficulties. Reasons for the sale included poor quality control, a field which has earned Sinclair a vaguely unreliable air about his business practice which he has yet to fully shake off. But the company made him rich for the first time. When he started Sinclair Research in 1979 there was no home computer market. There was a personal computer market used in business, but no manufacturer was producing a computer as a home entertainment system - a consumer durable like videos or fridges. The ZX81, a 3K mono computer which plugged into a TV, appeared in 1981 and was the first computer to cost under a hundred pounds. It sold over one million units, and was followed by the Spectrum which brought sales up to three million units. In 1983, Six Clive got a knighthood which recognised his success in creating a computer games industry - an industry he ironically saw as a spin-off market for a long time. That Sinclair feeling But Sinclair sought wider success. In 1985, he tried to break the mould of malting games machines by launching the QL - incredibly enough with a non-standard keyboard and disk drive which made it unacceptable for the business market for which it was intended. It was Sir Clive's last computer launched under his own name. The Spectrum Plus and 128 showed he had lost his touch, Expensive attempts to conquer the American market had failed.
Various buy-out attempts came to nothing until Sugar bought the company in 1986, effectively ending an era and starting a new and more functional era of computer use. Around the same time he had turned, his passion for an electric car into some sort of reality with the C5, and was then forced to watch the plastic trikes turn, in the full glare of the national spotlight, from an ■interesting' launch to a ghastly failure, as its potential danger became apparent. Sir Clive had to settle for being yesterday's man for a while Not for long. Forced to choose another name for his new company, Sir Clive came up with Cambridge Computer and launched the Z88 Rather amazingly for a portable that doesn't tun MS-DOS, it has established itself as a very credible option, More recently Cambridge launched its satellite receiver, and a portable running MS-DOS seems to be in the pipeline Intriguingiy, if Cambridge can produce this within the A4 size of the Z88, it Could yet steal the market from Amstrad's PPC, which is seen by many as The Portable That Almost Was... Sir Clive's rehabilitation was confirmed this month by his reappearance in The Sun (for getting married again), and shows the Great British Public to be a forgiving lot.
The reason for this is simple. Sir Clive is seen as a Barnes Wallis sort of character, a wacky bloke who invented the electronic age's equivalent of the bouncing bomb which worked against all the odds (the Japanese perhaps being the opponents this time around?). It's an image that suits him well. His rather quizzical expression, his membership of Mensa (the club for those with silly IQ s) and his much-quoted verbal excesses (see box) all add charm to the idea. But it's difficult to say exactly what Sir Clive is about because he's not technically too strong, nor does he manage his businesses very well. Perhaps his strength is the audacity to bring out the products he does - and make them succeed. His skill is in bringing down component parts in both cost and size, making his products attractive. His nose for economies of scale appears undiminished. But for all that he is not very good at selling his products. Rather, he offers them. Indeed if he ever did any market research (he doesn't believe in it) he may well have been persuaded not to try to sell a home computer But then he probably would have launched the QL with a full travel keyboard and 3,5 inch drives rather than microdrives... No, the fact is that Sinclair doesn't like building big businesses. His companies are all to do with him. None of his employees has ever really emerged out of the background - the nearest perhaps being Richard Altwasser who designed the Spectrum's innards and is currently engineering head at Amstrad. By keeping things small he ensures he can follow his latest passion without the hassle of worrying about his employees continued employment. Just as well, the cynics might say. Clive and well While Sir Clive is hot news again, these days he seems something of a reformed character. His previous pet indulgences - a loathing for anything to do with Acorn, and a tendency to sell a personal vision of a new electronic ‘Golden Age' which did not always translate into products that match the needs of the average computer buyer -are things of the past. It's just as well - these unhelpful fetishes served his rivals better than himself. Indeed, they allowed the strange axis between Sir Clive and Alan Sugar to spring up. Sinclair and Sugar: sometimes working A more unholy alliance you couldn't imagine. In temperament and looks, direction and lifestyle, the two men are exact opposites. Sugar has been openly rude about Sinclair, with comments about pregnant calculators and boffins, and there's no love lost at Sir Clive's end. It's now apparent that Sugar bought the Sinclair name for negative rather than constructive reasons. Basically, he wanted the name to stop Sinclair selling under his own name, because anything with the name Sinclair behind it has a ridiculously popular appeal to the computer-buying public. What does he aim to achieve in the future? It's difficult to .answer exactly, as Sinclair likes to cause a stir, and there's no obvious revolution around the corner. But once again he's in the position he most favours - the underdog who has public sympathy for his position selling new types of products. With Cambridge Computer he has found success with the portable Z88. With Shaye Communications he intends to launch a miniature pocket telephone, and with Anamartic we are promised a WSI (wafer scale integration) product which promises to speed up the operational speed of a chip by a factor of more than twenty. But what Sir Clive really wants is to create a new revolution. That always seems to be his goal, in whatever field. Whatever happens next, we are assured of a good run for our money where Sir Clive's concerned. His entertainment value is huge, and if some of his products are a bit off-beam, that's because computing is still a young field. There's still room for pioneers, and in Sinclair we find one of the most committed pioneers this country has produced for a good few decades. New Computer Express
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