Josh,

Most people don't know how easy it is to gather intelligence on a commercial competitor. Strangely, no matter where I was hired as a digital design engineer, when commercial intelligence matters came up, I always got included in the assignment (must have been something in my resume).

One of the most remarkable examples of companies unwittingly spilling the beans happened about 16 years ago while I was working as a digital designer at SD Systems.
One Monday morning at 8:30am, my VP.Engr came into my office and closed the door. He informed me confidentially that the Pres of the company was considering buying a new competitor and he needed some information to advise him by noon. Our non-engineer Pres had seen OCTAGON's two page productline introduction ads in BYTE magazine and had flown from our Dallas site to California over the weekend and negotiated a $Million plus buyout deal.

My VP (one of the three smart guys at that company) left me some catalogs and advertisements they had collected and I was to make an assessment upon that. He needed something quick because there was a noon meeting with the Pres. (This was long before you could go online to search for answers).

The OCTAGON ads were impressive, I had already seen them in two previous issues of BYTE magazine but wasn't too concerned or interested because the S-100 bus was dying and this industry only had about a year or two left anyway. I got out a magnifying glass and started looking over the photo images of the boards for impressions on their engineering skills.

Photo-analysis of PCBs is a double-edge sword. I had just come from a machevelian small company that knew every dirty trick in the book. I knew full well that often companies advertise products that haven't even been designed to see what type of market response they receive. At the previous company, we had a circuit layout contractor make us quick boards for photos with no traces on the back and just the chip density we thought believable for marketing photoshoots. We'd fabricate his fake-board and stuff it with sometimes an amusing set of chips. By reading the chip numbers off the photos of ads, you could tell who was cool and who wasn't. It was considered uncool to give your competitors any real circuit clues before you were selling the product; the longer you kept them in the dark, the better. :)

I started diagramming the chips and positions to see if this PCB layout was a real design. I had just designed SD Systems "Versa-Floppy III" and OCTAGON had a similar type product in their ad so I knew all the circuit characteristics it had to meet. It didn't take long to realize two important things:

(1) The photograph was of a real prototype. The chips were all feasible and their placement suggested a real layout.

(2) This company should NOT be bought for ANY reason. *** I'll keep you in suspense for now ***

Every PCB in the photo, had the same glaring problem. This information upon close inspection made moot any other information I might dig up. I briefed my VP around 10am and he was astonished but saw the obvious truth I had uncovered. Per his request I wrote a paper on my findings which he delivered to the Pres. during the noon meeting.

My VP later told me the Pres. couldn't believe it dispite his own assurances that there was no doubt to my conclusions. The Pres. was quoted as having said, "But he's not a *** Silicon Valley *** engineer... THEY have to know more than our Dallas engineers. They HAVE to be smarter."

The Pres. bought OCTAGON for a $Million or two anyway and me and my VP.Engr just shook our heads in amazement.

Six months after the deal, my VP.Engr. came into my office and handed me what looked like a pizza box and said, "You deserve to get a first look at this." Inside were the OCTAGON boards delivered after much unexplained delay... with precisely the unmarketable/unsellable "FIX" required that I had written in my photo-analysis. We both got a good long chuckle at that. The Pres. had to eat the investment and never sold one of OCTAGON's designs.

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I'll later post what the KEY was. Since there are collections of old BYTE magazines around, I think I'll leave this open for a day or so as a challenge. I've got both the old BYTE magazines and a clipped OCTAGON advertisement somewhere as a trophy so I'll see about scanning it and emailing it to anyone that wants to see some real-historic screw-ups hidden in plain sight.

Of course, you'll have the advantage of KNOWING that there is something there worthy to find. Its in circa 1982-84 back issues of BYTE magazine, the two page color-photo advertisement of OCTAGON.

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By the way, in my assessment I was able to make the following conclusions that were later validated:

(1) The know they must sell the company.
(2) They can't sell their product.
(3) They have never before designed a board and must be just out of college.

If you spot the mistake they made, you might be able to predict how they fixed it and describe the board I viewed when I opened the "Pizza Box".

:)

-Jay C. Box