Episode 19 A cry of joy “To get ahead of the times”

Strived to constantly evolve Released improved versions one after another

The “jX-WORD Taro”, released in February 1985, was priced at 58,000 yen. This was half the price of the preceding competitive product. That alone was a surprise, but for “Ichitaro Version 2,” released the following year, we decided to sell it to existing users for 30,000 yen without a trade-in. Our desire was to have as many people as possible use Ichitaro.

The strategy we employed to get more people to use our product was to upgrade it. We originally planned to introduce new versions one after another every three months, but the development could not keep up with that speed. Even so, we managed to release upgrades at a frequency that competitors could not follow.

Therefore, we placed great importance on user feedback, and included two postcards in the Ichitaro package. One of them is for registration. The other is for feedback. The reason for this is to listen to users’ opinions and incorporate them as a reference in the development of new functions to be added in the next version and to improve usability. I believe this approach is another secret of Ichitaro’s market domination.

As we had hoped, we received a lot of feedback through this postcard. We even set up a special shelf to store them and hired an organizer. We read through each and every one of them to evolve Ichitaro, incorporating features that users wanted.

These efforts bore fruit, with Ichitaro Version 2 recording sales of over 76,000 units. Furthermore, Ichitaro version 3 was released the following year, in June 1987, and became a huge hit, selling 310,000 units. As the third generation product, it was nicknamed “Santaro” by fans.

While our ingenuity may have been a factor in the success of this product, the underlying factor was the rapid growth of the personal computer market itself. At the time, the Internet was not yet as widespread as it is today, but I could sense that we were steadily approaching the era of “One PC Per Person” that I had envisioned when I founded the company.

I have mentioned several times earlier that I likened my life to the flow of the Yoshino River when I made the decision to start my own business. If I hang on to the wood that might flow to me and paddle it with my hands, I would be able to go faster than the current of the times. That was my thought.

At that time, I was so busy with my daily work that I did not have time to reflect upon those days, but looking back, I am sure that I was clinging to a large piece of wood called Ichitaro in the current of the computer age, and was frantically turning my hand and paddling to stay ahead of that current.

One such incident occurred after the release of Ichitaro in 1985. I was discussing with employees at a strategy meeting for the next version of our product in Ikeda-cho, up the Yoshino River from Tokushima City, where our head office is located, when I received a phone call from a woman who had been taking care of things in my absence.
“We’re in trouble, President. Please return here as soon as possible.”

I wondered what had happened, but it turned out that they just did not have enough personnel to open the envelopes received from users. At the time, we were receiving payments from users for product upgrades by registered mail. We had been storing these registered envelopes on a large shelf as tall as a person as a substitute for a safe, but the number of envelopes piled up to the point that we could no longer open them all, and they finally could not fit on the shelf anymore.

Furthermore, I was told that the middle finger of their right hand, which handles the scissors to open the envelopes, was rubbed and hurting. A cry of joy, that’s how I put it.
My goal of “becoming the best in Japan,” which I had vowed to myself in memory of my late student, has been achieved. However, Hatsuko still says, “I wish you had said that we were going to be the best in the world.” It might be just as she says. However, at that time, we still had many things that had to be accomplished in Japan. To help advance computers in this country and increase people’s intellectual productivity.

Floppy disk of “Ichitaro version 3”