Poem: Product Launch Window

Product Launch Window

After years in development
the company is prepared
to launch their new product.
It is far ahead of anything
that any competitor
has considered, well
beyond cutting edge.

But: disaster!  Day’s ahead
of launch, a chief rival
releases an identically
designed component,
accurate enough
to make clear
it must be espionage.

The board is furious,
investigates any possible
leak, and quickly discovers
the problem.  The CEO,
who inherited his shares
and thus the position
from the companies founder,
refuses the use of a dust bin
or even a filing cabinet,
insisting, instead, on turning
any paper that passes his desk
into a paper airplane
and launching it
from the window
of his office
on the seventy fifth floor.

No amount of cajoling
can make him budge,
and when they set up
a net outside his office,
he goes across the hall
and uses a conference room.

They hire a consulting firm
to study the problem,
and, after looking at
possible flight plans
for paper craft
sailing the winds
of that city,
they decide
it cannot be predicted,
and insist the only
course of action
is for the CEO to stop.

How unreasonable,
he says, we hired you
to solve this problem.
I am far too busy
to change my ways,
and I love the way they
fly.  What can you give
me that will match
to that?  And do not
suggest planes of plain
paper.  There is magic
in releasing those things
that should be called important.

He will never budge,
so the board tries to remove
him.  This, however, turns
impossible, as a clause
was prepared in his contract,
one that had been considered
insignificant and silly
when the founder had insisted
upon it. No one even recalled,
when the old man said
the boy would never
be responsible for cleaning
up his own office trash.
Throwing it out the window
was specifically stipulated
in the long list of clauses.
Seeing it made the chairman
tear up thinking how sharp
that man had been, even
as he cursed the codicil.

It is too late, anyhow
with the other company
already to market.
The insistence on secrecy
had kept R&D from filing
patents or copyrights;
releasing their own product
would look like they were copying.
Lawyers had already been looking
into the issue, but any action
was unadvisable with the outcome
so unpredictable as to be unwise.

They plead with the CEO once more,
but he insists his greatness
rests on being a man who
is unique and that were he barred
from ever again folding
important files into paper airplanes
then lofting them into the sky,
both symbolically and practically
he would no longer be such a man.

New consultants are hired,
the situation more thoroughly explained.
Meteorologists are consulted to craft
explicit maps for local wind currents
in changing conditions, charting for time
of day, for amount of shade
and percentage of precipitation.
Teams are deployed to catch
the planes, guided by GPS
augmented with weather data
and AI implementations based
on the data set, but, of course,
it does not work.  Sure, they catch
some of the papers, but the vast
majority are missed, still.
No one can predict the planes
themselves, the designs are too
imperfect and varied.

Somoene suggests that those whip-smart
engineers downstairs take a crack
at the solution. They already created the net,
but they think, maybe, some kind of system
to control the flight
make the planes all glide
the same path.

They spend years on the system,
develop a method for using
fans and vacuums
attached to the building
to create a vortex
that sails the planes
out in one straight line
where they can easily
be caught.  Of course,
the system is expensive,
and that project that failed
cost millions too,
and the company has lost
too much market share,
didn’t bring in even the revenue
required to redesign
their original product
to keep up with their
own invention.  It is over.
The planes sail straight out,
but carry only papers
on bankruptcy and liquidation
into the windows of the competition
who own the building across the street.