Chapter 139: Don't Take Steps That Are Too Large

Even if the old guy didn't understand game consoles, he finally grasped the situation: a trap had been laid long ago, and Atari would be buried the moment it stepped into the fray.

Steve Ross was currently nursing a massive headache. He naturally wanted to reverse the decline and had even managed to get his hands on a Legends World arcade cabinet, but unfortunately, William White was far more shameless than he had imagined.

The game could not be copied, and the system was burned directly into the memory chips; once dismantled, it was useless. The whole thing was disposable.

"What do you do if it breaks?" you ask.

You would need to replace the entire motherboard.

The machine wasn't designed to be repaired; it was made of proprietary components that were not easy to decipher. Even if you did manage to understand them, what about the mountain of patents?

Develop your own?

Sure, that was possible, but it would take at least a hundred million dollars. And then there were those damn games—that wasn't something you could finish in the short term. Having no creativity made the effort useless; programming wasn't the hard part, but game design was, and there was nowhere to buy that.

"Boss, are you not buying Disney anymore?"

"Hmm? Jason, why do you ask?"

"Everyone outside is saying that Disney's stock price seems to be sliding, too."

"You shouldn't take steps that are too big; it’s easy to pull a muscle."

"Pfft, Boss, what kind of joke is that?"

"Try it yourself and you'll know. If you break something, don't blame me."

Risk was fine, but spending a fortune unnecessarily was not. Rome wasn't built in a day; solidifying his foundation was what he needed to do.

"Let's go, Jason. It's such a hot day, let's go swimming."

"Boss, you've gotten quite tan lately."

"Haha, that's better. I was getting so pale, it was honestly embarrassing."

"Stop, stop, you silly dog, don't you dare go in there!"

*Splash!* The silly dog’s traits were painfully obvious: it simply wouldn't listen. This left William White completely speechless.

"Damn it, get up here right now, or I'm having you neutered!"

As long as that Husky was stirring up trouble, no one was going to have a pleasant time, because the creature loved to play the role of a lifeguard.

The two men and the dog were having a lively time, and the servants nearby were amused as well. They didn't know what outsiders thought of William White, but at home, he was just a big kid who loved to clown around—certainly not the stiff, serious figure the public imagined.

William White was enjoying his vacation. It was too hot to move anyway, and while the actors' strike had ended, no one was eager to get back to work since neither side was satisfied.

The one hit hardest was CAA. Many actors began to re-evaluate the agency; exploiting low-income actors too heavily was a bad idea, as it put big-name stars in an incredibly awkward position.

Most importantly, there was one person who refused to cooperate: White Pictures was no longer a small company. They were a heavyweight, and they had turned more than one actor into a star.

Many big-name actors actually understood that the agency’s "packaging" services did indeed increase their bargaining power. It was just a matter of differing standpoints; it wasn't about who was right or wrong. But the problem was that the practice sounded terrible. Hollywood was still, after all, the world of the struggling masses. Those at the top of the food chain were better off keeping their mouths shut.

William White knew he had only slowed CAA's momentum. The packaging service still had a significant market; the big shots didn't care about the lives of the struggling actors, and A-list stars naturally wanted their paychecks as high as possible.

As for the struggling actors?

Getting a movie role at all was a blessing, so who cared if the pay was low? In Hollywood, the most important thing was resources. If someone gave you a chance to audition, you should be thanking them—how dare you negotiate terms?

"Hmph, you bastards. Once CAA gets even stronger, you'll see how tough they are. Asking for paychecks in the hundreds of millions? Let’s see if you’re scared then."

William White mused silently. Paychecks were like salaries—easy to raise, but a nightmare to lower. When that day came, it would surely end in a mess.

There was already a trend toward this, though it hadn't reached absurd levels yet. In this era, actresses weren't worth much; it was mostly the male actors who were expensive. An A-list actress's salary was just "so-so," never exceeding five million.

"Sir, Jobs had someone deliver a computer. Do you want to see it now or later?"

"I'll take a look now. Did the person who delivered it leave?"

"Yes, they already left. They seemed to be in quite a hurry."

"Ha, the Great God Jobs is about to make a move."

After fiddling with the new Apple II, he discovered it was better than what he had provided them. It seemed the Great God Jobs' old habit had flared up again: not only did he refuse to admit defeat, but he was also determined to surpass him.

"Good heavens, if you keep playing like this, Markkula is going to be crying. Who is going to buy the Lisa computer? It’s definitely going to be another chaotic mess." William White settled in to watch the show, and reality turned out much as he expected.

Markkula was having a massive headache. A lot of money had already been poured into the Lisa project, and now they might need to replace the CPU—that was a major problem.

The prices were completely different, and as it stood now, the performance gap was truly limited.

Since William White could shrink the 68000, he could naturally shrink the 16-bit CPU as well. Whether by lowering the clock speed or directly narrowing the bus to 16-bit, the gap was easily maintained.

Wall Street thought William White was being aggressive, but the IT world didn't see it that way—especially the genius designers at Motorola.

They believed William White was "squeezing the toothpaste" and even hindering the progress of human technology.

William White couldn't be too harsh on the designers' complaints, so he switched to full "bullshit" mode, demanding they lower power consumption and claiming it was for the sake of the planet. Those supercomputers were too ridiculous; they required their own dedicated power stations, which wasn't exactly eco-friendly.

The designers were successfully fooled, and they quickly got back to work. William White wasn't stingy with R&D funds; it just didn't align with their preferred direction.

Motorola was very satisfied with the current situation. They held a significant amount of shares, and this chip division could eventually be spun off into its own public company. Any way you looked at it, they were coming out ahead.

In reality, it wasn't that he didn't want to innovate, but that it was truly impossible. Everyone's foundation was different; he didn't have as many brilliant designers as Intel. The 68000 was just a beautiful accident, and developing another one like it was impossible.

Developing a CPU in the U.S. was a pain in the neck. Unless you didn't plan on selling to government agencies, you needed a second supplier.

William White just wanted to ask: I’m the one who researched this, why should I make it cheap for those other bastards?

Even if he really needed a third party, he would never choose one with actual R&D capabilities. That was just asking for trouble.

Japanese manufacturers were a good choice. They might have the capability to research memory, but a CPU was absolutely out of the question—the Americans didn't teach them everything, and you'd have to be a fool to think otherwise.

The semiconductor industry was already chaotic enough. American memory factories couldn't beat the Japanese ones, and if things kept going, the U.S. might not have any memory factories left at all.

"A third party?"

"We've got one. Just pull a workshop out of Ricoh and claim it doesn't belong to the joint venture. No one will be able to do a thing about it."

For William White's shamelessness, Motorola could only express their admiration.

*Damn it,* he actually managed to say it with a straight face.