Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (34 page)

The artificially intelligent machine will make an enormous difference. We’ll be able to have in the home a machine that performs many of the functions of the professionals we go to today - doctor, teacher or lawyer ... There’ll be robots to go out to the Third World with real intelligence and endless patience to educate vast numbers of people. Full employment will return in the 1990s - if we don’t get a Marxist government or something. We’ll have highly automated factories employing very few. People will work more in the service industries. (Woman’s Own, May 1985.)

Be it a matchbox radio or an electronic trike he’s announcing, Sinclair has always presented himself as a man who conjures the dreams of the future from an imaginative development of contemporary technology. From the careful cultivation of his own image as the boffin of the people, to the promotion of the MetaLab as a hotbed of applied intellect smashing through the frontiers of consumable technology, Sinclair has shown himself to be a subtle and tireless manipulator of popular archetypes. In tracing the development of the Sinclair companies and the progress of their founder, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that one is chronicling the gradual perfection of a sophisticated and profoundly marketable icon whose benign image implicitly bestows credibility on the products with which it is associated. Of course, there’s nothing new about developing a warm and dependable front for the company you’re promoting, and if this can be personified by an instantly recognizable and avuncular caricature, so much the better.

Clive Sinclair has always devoted a great deal of attention to the refinement of a commercial image. In the early days of his career, such efforts were concentrated on the manner in which his products and companies were presented to the outside world. Up until recently, however, the emphasis had shifted to the development of his own image, which, by an unusually effective process of osmosis, communicated hi-tech credibility and a promise for the future to the products offered by his company. The importance of the Sinclair image is explained by Andy Knott of Kinnear, the PR company that handled the Research account until recently:

[Clive] also contributes the personality that is viewed from the outside, and actually that is very valuable. When people go in to buy a Sinclair product it’s almost as if they’re buying it from a friend - you know, my uncle made this ... (Interview, 22 October 1985.)

The resilience of Sinclair’s public persona is exemplified by the market response to the launch of the QL, the long-awaited successor to the Spectrum and Sinclair’s first attempt to reap the rich rewards of the business market. As we have seen, both the machine and its launch were essentially a disaster, and in the years that followed the machine’s launch, Research was forced to incorporate seventeen sets of design modifications in an effort to rectify the multitude of faults. With Alan Sugar’s decision to exclude the machine from the Amstrad distribution line, the QL will, let us hope, take a well-deserved dive into oblivion. The following report, published well over a year after the launch of the machine, summarized the effects of the QL’s failure:

Sir Clive Sinclair has confirmed that production of his QL micro computer has been suspended for two months. He refused to say when production is likely to start up again or how many QLs are stockpiled ... Mike Whitaker of brokers Simon and Coates commented: ‘I think Sinclair is still trading at a monthly loss; the company’s older Spectrum computer has passed its peak and the QL has failed to take off.’ (Guardian, April 1985.)

That Sinclair Research had taken money from the faithful and then dumped an unfinished product into their laps was never denied by the company. Indeed, when discussing the QL’s hard- and software failings, Sir Clive seemed to suggest that the initial purchasers of a new Sinclair product were actually taking part in some kind of communal R&D exercise. The QL’s market performance can be regarded as a fair indication of the public’s reaction to such a stance. But how can we account for the failures that have punctuated Sinclair’s career? How can you explain something like the QL? It can’t be put down to ignorance. More than two years before the appearance of the machine, Sinclair made it clear that he was aware of the consequences of a QL-style launch in his response to Martin Hayman’s questions about companies who announce and market products prematurely:

Yes, there is far too much of that about [the premature announcement of products] and it is very silly. It mucks up the marketplace at the time but it rebounds on the company eventually. They [the competition] are talking about products that are further and further away. If we announce a product now, it is because it is ready for production. (Practical Computing, July 1982.)

So Sir Clive is not unaware of the consequences of running a business the way he has run Sinclair Research. Was he aware of the wealth of consumer loyalty that was squandered with the QL’s launch? The measure of that loyalty can be gathered from a review of the public’s initial reaction to the QL circus. In spite of the lack of a visible product, out-of-pocket customers actively struggled to swallow the company’s excuses and even came up with some of their own. Of course, it wasn’t the micro they’d never seen to which they were committed, but the man everyone believed to be behind it - Uncle Clive. Naturally, as the truth about the QL leaked out, so public opinion gradually turned against the company and, to a lesser extent, its founder. Yet how can that initial loyalty be accounted for? Why did so many people seem to have almost an emotional investment in Sinclair’s success? The fact is, they wanted to believe in him. Despite the volume of dissatisfaction surrounding the distribution, sales and servicing of the Spectrum, and the fact that these symptoms of apparent contempt for the consumer were replicated with a vengeance with the launch of the QL, both the public and the trade press initially greeted the arrival of the new machine with a benevolence verging on collective blindness. For example, journalists on Personal Computer News managed to carry out a four-page ‘Pre-Test’ (4 February 1984) on the new Sinclair machine, undeterred by the fact that the QL in question didn’t actually work:

It is impossible not to be carried away by the QL. Unless it proves to have very serious faults or drawbacks when in use we can safely nominate it as Machine of the Year for 1984. Sir Clive has identified the demand to launch another mass-market computer where volume sales can keep down cost and low cost can assure volume sales.

Coven the fact that no complete working prototype existed at the launch of the machine (see p. 174), the sense of a mass delusion reminiscent of the Emperor’s new clothes becomes irresistible when reading reports of the event:

Each of Sinclair’s new machines has been more amazing than the one before, but this time he has really excelled himself. The QL fully deserves the initials, which stand for Quantum Leap, it is so far ahead of everything else at the same price ... That at least was my impression at the launch of the QL, where all the demonstrations were run using real machines, said to be ‘pilot production models’. On past performance, the QL should be well made but there will probably be supply problems due to demand. There will also be bugs, and some features of the QL will turn out to have unforeseen and possibly unwanted consequences. But even so, the Research QL is too powerful a machine for anyone to ignore - and that includes professional and educational as well as home micro users. (Jack Schofield, Practical Computing, March 1984.)

At the end of a review heavy with reservations tempered by praise, Schofield concludes:

If the QL is reliable, delivered in quantity and lives up to its promise, it should do very well indeed, providing competition even for the IBM.

In other words, if the Emperor is wearing clothes, then they are beautiful! The tortuous deliberations of the apologists find their ultimate expression in the launch issue of QL User (July 1984). Nigel Cross makes one suspect that a quantum leap has something to do with bending over backwards:

Much as I’m a born cynic, sceptic and a member of the ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ school, now that I’ve actually seen it - both in pre- and initial production form - I actually tend to believe it. Admittedly I haven’t seen the final production version, but that’s largely irrelevant. It’s still a ‘good thing’ and it can only get better. Of course it’s not perfect - but how many new products are?

While market and media support for Sir Clive would gradually fall away over the next year or so, it is a measure of the potency of the Sinclair image that, even after the QL, his company could continue to sell related products into a contracting market and even consolidate its position as market leader. In the fickle world of the computer press there appears to have been an almost desperate desire to see the new Sinclair creation succeed. It’s almost as if the industry’s commentators had come to regard the success of Sinclair Research as inexorably linked to their own credibility as the spokespersons of the micro age. Although it may seem fanciful today, there are many journalists who are prepared to admit that at the time the success or failure of Clive Sinclair, the universally acknowledged figurehead of the sunrise industries, seemed pivotal to the value and status of their own work.

This curious state of affairs will undoubtedly prove of little more than passing interest to anyone attempting to unravel the semiotics of an era littered with garbled and ephemeral signifiers. However, from our point of view, Sinclair’s preoccupation with personal and corporate image offers a partial explanation for some of his most spectacular successes, as well as providing significant insights into the roots of his failures. It would be simplistic to conclude that Sir Clive is merely the victim of his own propaganda, although there is certainly an element of truth in such a view. A more productive line of thought starts from the premiss that the Sinclair advertising campaigns and PR stance initiated a dialectical process that detrimentally influenced both the company and the market.

From the outset, the creation of a strong market image was a high priority for any Sinclair enterprise. Even in the days when he was mailing amplifier kits from a friend’s flat in Islington, the young Clive Sinclair was determined not to be lost in the crowd. The electronics magazines of the early 1960s were packed with hundreds of uniformly uninspiring adverts offering a thousand arcane gadgets to the enthusiast. Like Sinclair, most of the young hopefuls touting their wares were electronics hardliners, garage entrepreneurs struggling to make a business out of a hobby. Like most enthusiasts, they were convinced that their products would sell themselves and that there was little point in preaching to the converted. Thus the description, specifications, price and origin of the products were invariably crammed into a 2-inch square of advertising copy, invisible to all but the tireless obsessive. Such anonymity was never to plague a Sinclair creation. One of the hallmarks of Sir Clive’s business style has been to take a cottage industry and make it roar like a multinational:

In those days ... everybody was taking tiny ads. Even if they had a lot of products, they would take a lot of tiny ads. Some took a page of them. I decided to take a half-page for just one product. It worked like a treat, and people thought I was running a much bigger business than I was. (Tycoons, p. 158.)

By April 1966, when he had moved his mail-order operation to Newmarket Road in Cambridge, the stature of Sinclair Radionics was further enhanced by an invitation to clients to mail their orders to a decidedly semi-detached ‘Sinclair House’, a promotional ploy that was dropped a month later, presumably as a consequence of bewilderment at the GPO. However, in spite of occasionally missing the mark, it’s clear that as a salesman Sinclair had discovered his true vocation. In the context of the competition, his early Radionics promotions were indisputably imaginative, if a little eccentric. The deb cheerfully fingering a matchbox radio can be regarded as an innocent anticipation of today’s more offensive campaigns, adding a taste of glamour unheard of in the gritty world of electronics in the 1960s. On the other hand, Sinclair’s use of Jane, ‘the well-loved dog of the Beckingham family’, in the promotion of the same product reveals an unexpected flair for the surreal. It seems unlikely that Sinclair’s snap of a labrador with a Micro-6 plugged into its ear did much for the radio’s sales.

Up until recently, apart from the Radionics scientific instrument line the Sinclair product range has remained determinedly within the confines of the consumer-electronics market. Thus, although the products were promoted with the promise of the new technology, their development was an exercise in style rather than a commercial scientific endeavour. From the earliest Radionics kits through to the C5, it was an impression of technological progress that was communicated by the design of the products. Like many companies marketing consumer electronics, Sinclair quickly learned that application must always take second place to concept and style.

Throughout the history of Sinclair products we have seen how the starting point for the development engineers was always defined in terms of size and appearance. In one of the most vivid descriptions of the man offered by an associate, Alfred Marks emphasizes Sir Clive’s preoccupation with style:

A very elegant fellow is Clive. He always had a panache, a sang-froid, a sort of devil-may-care attitude, but a man of some considerable instinct in taste. (Interview, 25 September 1985.)

Just as they were to provide him with a source of inspiration in the creation of future products, the American electronics magazines seemed to have served as a model for Sinclair’s early promotional campaigns. Unlike the competition, Sinclair Radionics made extensive use of testimonials from satisfied customers who extolled the virtues of life in a Sinclair world. Even at this early stage in his career, Sinclair was promoting a world in which a new technology was capable of sweeping the consumer into a future enriched by the gadgets of convenience. Nowhere in his advertisements was there any attempt to explain why miniaturization was a necessary good. According to Alfred Marks, it was simply one of his stylistic obsessions: