It is perhaps the nature of the beast at present, and it may always be this way, but the only time a company’s Web site usually tells us something new is when it doesn’t mention something we think should be there. Tadpole Technology Plc is a case in point. The site opines about the benefits of the company’s Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc and Digital Equipment Corp Alpha-based notebooks and its embedded PowerPC and Sparc controllers. But the Intel Corp Pentium P1000 notebooks are nowhere to be seen . Introduced two years ago, the Pentium machines have proved something of a problem child for the Cambridge, UK-based company. The reason for the disappearing act is that Tadpole is now looking for an OEM deal for the Pentium boxes.
Niche player
In the chief executive’s seat for barely a week, former Santa Cruz Operation Inc executive Bernard Hulme, said that people buy it for its ruggedness. And if the only reason for buying a computer is the type of metal the box is made from, you know that something’s up. Tadpole is a niche player, and the P1000 notebooks don’t seem to be have been niche enough. So it is talking to other iAPX-86-based notebook manufacturers about re-badging the Tadpole machines as their own, and using their marke ting muscle to make a go of the things. It would be a surprise if at least one of the heavy hitters in the notebook business were not involved though. Hulme said that from Tadpole’s point of view, the high-end notebook market still had a future in terms of design, if not manufacturing for the company. Last year, Tadpole was believed to be looking for a buyer for the P1000 line and called in merger and acquisition specialists Broadview Associates Ltd to review strategic partnership alternative s aimed at maximizing shareholder value, but nothing came of it. Hulme arrived at Tadpole’s door from Santa Cruz following the resignation of former chief executive and company founder George Grey, who resigned July 5. At Santa Cruz Hulme has been senior vice-president and general manager for international operations and had also been vice-president of worldwide marketing. Prior to that, he was at ICL Plc, where he was responsible for its worldwide Unix server business. Tadpole has promoted engineering chief Mike Hancock as new technical director to replace the engineering nous that Grey brought to the outfit.
Hulme’s talent is marketing, something Tadpole hasn’t been particularly good at, and cost it a lot of friends on the London Stock Exchange. It was trading around 58 pence last week, a far cry from the 400 pence and more it was at in 1994. Ironically enough, it was the P1000 notebook that drove the share price up at the time. Investors were jumping for joy at a company like Tadpole getting into the high-end Pentium notebook market, and providing a machine twice as fast as the puny 75MHz machine s available back then. But Tadpole was not quick enough, smart enough, or perhaps crucially, big enough and the rest caught on and caught up, while potential buyers looked elsewhere. The thing is that nobody else did sell anything like that, which goes to show how bad the marketing effort must have been. The other body blow was IBM Corp’s decision to cancel a follow-on contract for Tadpole to build the RS/6000 N40 PowerPC notebook, which caused job losses and the closure of a factory in Austin, Texas. Tadpole has reported fairly encouraging financial results this year, cutting its losses in the first two quarters and pinning its hopes for a return to profitability on the Alphabook, launched at the back-end of last year. Hulme said the company is enjoying life as a Sparc-compatible manufacturer. He said that during his six-year sojourn at Santa Cruz he’d seen the Sparc chip business shake down to just Sun and Fujitsu Ltd, and reckons there is a reasonable balance between the two. He’d seen Sparc go off the boil and come back on, despite its problems and the market was now in pretty good shape in his opinion. He saw no problem dealing with Sun and enjoyed a very encouraging level of co-operation. He said he didn’t find himself dealing with a company that said keep out – this is my territory. After all, Hulme said, it’s not as if Tadpole is competing with Sun in the portable workstation market. Hulme said Tadpole is going to concentrate on getting into some markets in depth with the Sparcbooks, notably software development, mobile Sparc servers, defense and telecommunications.
Success story
Over on the Alphabook front, it’s still early days. It’s a pretty neat technological feat. But regarding the marketing effort, Hulme said what they so far haven’t done is in-depth work on what markets need to be addressed by the Alphabooks. The major area at the moment is defence, where the OpenVMS operating system is popular. It also sells into the mobile VMS administration market. Hulme predicted that with some focus, the Alphabook will be quite a success story. Mind you, it will have to be, if Tadpole is to have a future. Hulme said that in the notebook market, the segments pop out at you. Here’s hoping they pop out pretty hard and hit Tadpole’s marketing machine between the eyes, thus keeping alive one of the last British computer manufacturers.
By Nick Patience
