Westward ho! A California adventure

Nothing lasts for ever, and all good things eventually come to an end. And so it was for my time and youthful exuberance in the Product Planning and Management organization of NEC's U.S. computer division. NEC had premium product lines, but coveted the larger market share of other U.S. PC vendors. In Japan NEC ruled the roost in marketshare for PCs, but in the U.S. that goal always seemed out of grasp. So ultimately, the unthinkable happened..... after years of rolling lay-offs to trim the fat and cut the deadwood, our division was now going to merge with - gasp! - the value leader in the PC foodchain. Corporate chieftains back in Tokyo decided that combining Packard Bell's 37% market share with NEC's premium brand name and high quality products would result in larger market share and higher volume for all products. But no-one asked my opinion! No-one asked me what I thought of a merger between a value leader and a premium brand..... Of merging two corporate cultures so vastly different from each other any resemblence was pure coincidence.....

With the merger came redundancy in groups, and re-assignments to optimize human resources. In my case, over the years I had been promoted from product manager to senior product manager to product line manager heading up a staff of project managers and product planners for consumer PCs. The newly merged company didn't need two planning groups focused on consumer PCs, and since Packard Bell's strength was in consumer PCs, their group was chosen to stay in place. I was asked to go back to my roots in software engineering and lead a dozen engineers developing the software pre-loads for commercial and consumer desktop PCs. I accepted the new assignment, and went at it with gusto, refreshing my technical skills, leading my new team, and diving into Microsoft OEM Pre-Installation Kit (OPK) code with relish.....

Which was quite fortuitous, because about a year later I received a call from a Sony recruiter, offering me the moon and stars to come to California and help them ramp up their new PC division. Discussions with my wife and kids ensued, I finalized negotiations with my new employer, and we were ready to embark on a new adventure. Westward ho! My ten year career at NEC had come to an end, but a whole new career awaited me at Sony..... And moving from Boston, my hometown and where we had lived for the past fourteen years, to the Silicon Valley in California, was a exciting adventure just waiting to happen. Me, my wife and kids were all looking forward to having a California adventure..... little did we know all the peaks and valleys ahead of us.....