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Forward When I first began to look for Marketing/Engineering Ratio™ data in 1992, I realized that opportunities for research were all around me: with my clients, in the MIT Enterprise Forum cases, in my professional circles, and in the newspaper. The Boston Globe's Business Section, day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month, and year-after-year chronicles the rise-and-fall of many technology-based enterprises. The Globe's rich tapestry of business successes and failures became:
For example, Aaron Zitner's Globe article, "Thinking Machines To File For Bankruptcy" (August 16, 1994) led me to target Thinking Machines and triggered five personal visits to gather data while the key players were still available. Aaron's nearly 4,000 word historical panorama, "Sinking Machines ... Lack of Market Vision Blamed in Fall," Boston Globe (September 6, 1994) supplied corroboration of the extreme failure, validation that lack of Marketing was decisive, and further relevant material. Fifteen months after I had garnered M/E Ratio™ from Intuit, a pair of Globe articles supplied financial details just in time for inclusion in my June 1995 paper, "Who Is Going To Buy The Darn Thing?" They were "Intuit Deal OK May Cost Microsoft," Wendy Goldman Rohm, Boston Globe (April 21, 1995) and "Analysts Shrug Off US Suit Blocking Microsoft Merger," Beppe Crosariol, Boston Globe (April 29, 1995). By 2001, I already had Polaroid's M/E Ratio™ for three years and had been predicting bankruptcy when, just four months before Polaroid declared bankruptcy, Steven Syre and Charles Stein wrote a powerful comparison of Polaroid and Xerox:
Exactly! Let’s learn. Their article presented a challenge to garner M/E Ratio™ from Xerox, which I did within three months. It was my professional pleasure to quote this story and the following one in "The Board of Directors; Vital Partner for a VoC Culture." More recently, Robert Weisman revisited the Polaroid saga in comparison to other rise-and-fall companies:
In turn, Robert Weisman of the Boston Globe wrote a story on the Grabowski Ratio™.
Ralph Grabowski
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