9 - The Giant Paid Them No Heed . . .

Summary

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

—Thomas Edison

During Mark Ain's search for the right product upon which to found his company, he sought an industry that had not yet reaped the benefits of incorporating the emerging technologies of the day. But though that was his principle criteria, it was perhaps a secondary ingredient to his game plan that ultimately allowed a fledgling company like Kronos to survive long enough to thrive.

The realm into which he would seek to make inroads should, he believed, be dominated by a behemoth: an engineering and manufacturing titan so enormous within its space that it would pay little heed to a tiny niche player attempting to reinvent how things were done.

The realm of timekeeping in the United States turned out to be just such a domain. Clocks were manual, and so was the laborious process of tabulating the time represented on time cards. At the top of the heap sat a giant—one blissfully unaware of Mark's aspirations to play David to its Goliath.

Ironically, the behemoth in question, the Simplex Time Recorder Company, had been born of a technology-based innovation of its own. Edward A. Watkins, who was in charge of the engineering department of a then-prominent furniture maker in nearby Gardner, Massachusetts, had invented and patented one of the first practical time clocks back in 1894. Watkins’ device was considered one of the earliest information technology devices ever deployed in a workplace. Almost a century later, and after a 1950 acquisition of a time clock division within IBM, Simplex was the gold standard in timekeeping in the U.S. And a third generation of the Watkins family was at the helm.

Mark didn't stand in front of Simplex as he loaded his sling with a stone. But he might as well have.

“Quite a few of the salespeople we hired had been selling for Simplex,” he recalled. “In fact, when we went to a new city, we’d purposely find Simplex salespeople and convince them that ours was the clock they should be selling.”