Read Online Disclosure: A Novel by Michael Crichton - Free Book Online Page B

DigiCom has always been its Advanced Products Group, which consists of four separate divisions as you see here. But as all information throughout the world becomes digital, these divisions will inevitably merge." On the screen, the pieces of the heart slid back together, and the heart transformed itself into a spinning globe. It began to throw off products. "For the customer in the near future, armed with cellular phone, built-in fax modem, and handheld computer or PDA, it will be increasingly irrelevant where in the world he or she is and where the information is coming from. We are talking about the true globalization of information, and this implies an array of new products for our major markets in business and education." The globe expanded and dissolved, became classrooms on all continents, students at desks. "In particular, education will be a growing focus of this company as technology moves from print to digital displays to virtual environments. Now, let's review exactly what this means, and where I see it taking us."

    And she proceeded to do it all-hypermedia, embedded video, authoring systems, work-group structures, academic sourcing, customer acceptance. She moved on to the cost structures-projected research outlays and revenues, five-year goals, offshore variables.
    Then to major product challenges-quality control, user feedback, shorter development cycles.

    Meredith Johnson's presentation was flawless, the images blending and flowing across the screen, her voice confident, no hesitation, no pauses. As she continued, the room became quiet, the atmosphere distinctly respectful.

    "Although this is not the time to go into technical matters," she said, "I want to mention that new CD-drive seek times under a hundred milliseconds, combined with new compression algorithms, should shift the industry standard for CD to fullres digitized video at sixty fields per second. And we are talking about platformindependent RISC

    processors supported by 3z-bit color active-matrix displays and portable hard copy at 12oo DPI and wireless networking in both LAN and WAN configurations. Combine that with an autonomously generated virtual database especially when ROM-based software agents for object definition and classification are in place and I think we can agree we are looking at prospects for a very exciting future."

    Sanders saw that Don Cherry's mouth was hanging open. Sanders leaned over to Kaplan.
    "Sounds like she knows her stuff."

    "Yes," Kaplan said, nodding. "The demo queen. She started out doing demos.
    Appearance has always been her strongest point." Sanders glanced at Kaplan; she looked away.

    But then the speech ended. There was applause as the lights came up, and Johnson went back to her seat. The room broke up, people heading back to work. Johnson left Garvin, and went directly to Don Cherry, said a few words to him. Cherry smiled: the charmed geek. Then Meredith went across the room to Mary Anne, spoke briefly to her, and then to Mark Lewyn.

    "She's smart," Kaplan said, watching her, "touching base with all the division heads especially since she didn't name them in her speech."

    Sanders frowned. "You think that's significant?"

    "Only if she's planning to make changes."

    "Phil said she wasn't going to."

    "But you never know, do you?" Kaplan said, standing up, dropping her napkin on the table. "I've got to go-and it looks like you're next on her list."

    Kaplan moved discreetly away as Meredith came up to Sanders. She was smiling. "I wanted to apologize, Tom," Meredith said, "for not mentioning your name and the names of the other division heads in my presentation. I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea.
    It's just that Bob asked me to keep it short."

    "Well," Sanders said, "it looks like you won everybody over. The reaction was very favorable."

    "I hope so. Listen," she said, putting her hand on his arm, "we've got a slew of due diligence sessions tomorrow. I've been asking all the heads to meet with