An Open Letter to Texas Instruments

Dear Dumbshits,

Back in the day, you built a truly wonderful computer. I know because I had one. I also had the expansion box that weighed as much as the USS Missouri. And I still have the 300 baud modem that you built for it. Now, you're left with your IC market and some calculators. Me, I prefer my HP50g, but some of the calculators you make are pretty good. Given that you do not dominate the market in handheld calculators, you'd expect that any news, or "buzz" as the current phrase goes, that generates publicity for your calculator would be a good thing.

I guess you didn't get that memo.

Seems a hacker has managed to crack the encryption key for one of your calculators. And you're pissed about it. Sent him a high-falutin' memo stating, "Stop that!" Threw in some big words and acronyms, including DMCA.

I guess you just. Don't. Get. It.

You have a group of people who are dedicated to tinkering with your calculator. Are they trying to reverse engineer your hardware so that they can make their own? No. Are they selling the software that they have managed to reverse engineer? No. But because you are currently suffering from some cranial-rectal inversion, you're going to be the guy with the truly smelly flatulence who just arrived at the tea party. And instead of saying, "Hey, we've got a lot of people who are looking at our calculators as cool! Let's build up some buzz! Have a conference! Start a contest for looking at some other part of the calculator!", you decide to kill the party just as soon as it starts.

Are you REALLY this stupid?!?! Can't you SEE the possibilities here!?!? So they cracked the encryption key of your vaunted $100 calculator. And somehow you think this is going to impede on your corporate profits. Ya know, it might. But something tells me that, if you saw this as a potential to improve the market share, to increase awareness (People thinking, "TI still makes calculators? Hey, I thought they quit after that TI 2500 Datamath thingee."), to really and truly hype your calculators, you'd be on the right track. Are you following me here? Can you see where I'm going with this?

That's right. Park your lawyers in the closet for a few minutes and figure the possibilities. Lots of buzz, lots of hype, lots of publicity, lots of free advertising. For YOUR calculator. You know, the one you want to sell more of? Hellooooooo?!?! And all you have to do is to say, "Ya know, perhaps we should concentrate on the hardware and not so much on the software. Perhaps we can even make it open source. If we do that, there's this whole community of open source people out there. Perhaps they'll want to buy our hardware. And by default we can control that." (knock-knock. Anyone home?)

Please. Consider what I'm saying. You can either stay on this same road. Or you can really and truly make a comeback in the calculator department by embracing a different mindset. The choice is yours.