I worked for Toshiba America. The story is the CEO at the time told his underlings "I cannot report such earnings to our shareholders". His executives then went ahead and cooked the books.
Beyond that, Toshiba was a company in crisis. They announced all sorts of forward looking partnerships via press releases and had powerpoints about them, but allocated ZERO budget to implement them.
They ordered their existing units (seemingly hundreds of business units) to stay the course on obsolete and non-competitive products that were not generating revenue any longer.
Their cloud and "chip to cloud" plans were Potemkin villages, devoid of tech or investment.
Their PC division was non-competitive with flash storage, even though Toshiba's disk division INVENTED flash storage (and that was unpopular in that division--it went to market with much opposition, driven by ONE guy).
Toshiba basically played fortress Japan, where they made handshake deals with other moribund Keiretsu would just cross sell to each other.
They were being out innovated on all fronts, and were paralyzed to make the big changes, as the culture was one of never rocking the boat, and hanging on till retirement. The dream was to retire and perhaps be asked to consult back to the company.
The same thing was going on with the other firms there, like Sony et al. Disruption, the cloud, open source and innovation just destroyed a firm with an amazing historical legacy.
Can somebody expound a little more on what the fraud was?
Edit: I believe the tweet is referring to the 2015 accounting scandal (listed on wikipedia here[0]), more information on how it happened here[1].
From what I understand, the oscillations come from the fact that corporate leadership handed down profit targets for business unit presidents to meet, with the expectation that failure to meet them = you're fired. So the business unit presidents worked with accountants to fudge the numbers at the end of every quarter to meet the unrealistic targets. Then the numbers would revert back to reality at the start of the next quarter. Corporate leadership was only looking at end-of-quarter numbers so they just kept increasing the (already unrealistic) profit targets year after year? Or maybe they understood what was going on but liked the effect it was having on their stock options/bonuses/whatever, so they kept perpetuating the fraud? But then again, why allow profits to revert back to reality, why not fudge profits all the way to hide the oscillations?
My vote is on corporate leadership incompetence. When you have a dictatorship-like culture of strict obedience, you start having an information propagation problem. Your underlings will suppress information they know you won't like (because you'll punish them) and will only feed you the truth when convenient. They will also outright lie if they have to, to save themselves from your wrath.
I wonder if big Japanese companies are doing more internal auditing, as a result of the recent fiasco with Nissan and Ghosn that saw Ghosn's ouster and arrest and subsequent escape.
That's too bad. I had toshiba laptop from 2008-2014 or 2015 or so. It was probably my longest lasting and hardest treated one. That thing carried me all through school, travelled to yellowstone and all around BC, was taken to camp sites and used during field work. I regularly threw it in a backpack with no case or anything packed in with a bunch of stuff and carried it well over a few hundred km over the years like that.
I'm still not sure exactly what's wrong with it. The original hard drive ended up with a corrupted MBR, then the replacement drive i put in ended up with the same thing within a day. I just ended up retiring it and getting a new one.
Though for a while though i was keeping that thing on life support by running a linux distro partitioned across 4 usb flash drives just so i could keep using it for a bit longer. I managed to recover everything off the drives that way too.
By comparison, the acer i replaced it with ended up needing a screen replacement within 2 years and that thing just pretty much hung out at home.
I got a ~$250 Toshiba in 2012 for college. I added a small SSD and 4GBs ram so maybe $350 total. A few years later I replaced the CD drive with a hard drive since the SSD filled up pretty quick. I still use it daily 8 years later.
My only complaint is the cheap plastic case has deteriorated so it's partially held together by tape now. I also had to replace the screen hinges a few years ago.
But compared to the Acer before it (2008 bad Nvidia GPU) and my wife's trash HP laptop the Toshiba has been worth every penny.
Same experience here. Those laptops have been really reliable.
A shitty courier company apparently loaded a fridge over one corner of my laptop while transporting it (don't ask why or how it happened) and the end result was the laptop broke at the corner (imagine loading 200kg on side of a fibre glass plate).
Long story short the hinge popped off, the laptop's display bottom totally teared up and yet lo and behold it's still working since the last 5 years. It looks like a Frankenstein laptop but it works flawlessly and never has given me any issues. My asus laptop on the other hand.. :/
My father had a computer store that sold Taiwanese desktop clones and Toshiba laptops in the late 80s. The article says that Toshiba were manufacturing laptops from 1985. I'm pretty sure we were selling them in 1987 so I didn't realise quite how close to the start we were. They were very good laptops at the time - their only real competitor was the Compaq laptop range and I'd argue that the Toshibas were better, although I'm obviously biased.
Just looking now at wikipedia, I'm sure that we sold the T1000 [1] and T1200 [2] but I'm not sure if we ever sold the T1100 [3] (their first model). We also sold the T3100 [4] which had a gas plasma screen that was quite a wondrous thing at the time. It was also very expensive. They were mostly bought by higher level executives as a status symbol. My father kept one for personal use too.
It was a very profitable business to be in at the time - margins were high, unlike the razor-thin margins of today. But my dad didn't capitalise on it as well as he should have. He overpaid his sales staff when they really weren't having to make much of an effort to sell such a hot item. And he didn't pay enough attention to the accounts so that when the recession of the early 90s arrived and government departments stopped buying he hit a cashflow problem and the company went bust. But there were a few good years before that and I still remember the Toshiba laptops of that time quite fondly.
Wait. They sold the business to sharp, which renamed it Dynabook. so this isn't entirely new. (Sharp just recently acquired the remaining 19% of Toshiba's notebook company it didn't already own.)
I had a Toshiba Chromebook for a little while and it was fantastic, a machine focused around meeting all the hardware needs to be “good enough” at a reasonable price. It had a great 1080p display, good performance, a good keyboard and great build. All under $300. Oh well. Such is life.
My first developer laptop was one of these hacked to run Ubuntu. I think I dropped $400 on it. That puppy took me from barista to employed software developer.
Afterwards it found a second life as my favorite travel / bedside laptop until a glass of water claimed its life a few years back.
Agreed, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is nice, 4GB RAM, good keyboard, beautiful screen. But the web has become so slow and bloated, it's not very usable anymore. It now works as dedicated recipe terminal in the kitchen. It is still getting ChromeOS updates, until next year I think.
Two of my children are still using these. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 is available (swappa.com, eBay, etc.) in 2014 or 2015 versions. The major difference seems to be that the 2015 has backlit keys and is very rare compared to the 2014.
I bought protective shells for them and that made a huge difference in longevity. The kids would tend to pick up their computers by the top/screen and could crack the screen or knock a connector loose.
The speakers on it are also decent, which my kids appreciate.
I really don't see how people can use the typical Chromebook with its 1366 x 768 screen except that it would make you focus solely on what was on screen.
Haha. My first ever non-antique laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro circa 2000. Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a car. One of said fellows is apparently now running some major blockchain thought leader scammery. People don't change their colours.
Prior to that I acquired this guy donated through the local 2600 chapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg and submitted an nmap fingerprint for its DOS-based, parallel-port driven TCP/IP stack! Good times.
I worked in tech support for Winbook laptops from ~94-96 at their call center in Columbus. We had a small crew of engineers there as well and we'd regularly buy Toshibas and tear them apart just to check out the competition. They were definitely the gold standard.
Also got a job offer to work at McMurdo Station on the south pole after getting them up and running on a few laptops. Never took it due to some matrimonial commitments, but did get a cool hat and pin out of the deal.
Good times. (It's Doogie if anybody that worked then is in here)
Tecra 500CDT for me. Dual booted Windows largely for DOS gaming, and Debian.
But what I really wanted (and still occasionally look up on eBay) was one of the tiny Librettos. Never took the dive though and as the years passed the spec became harder and harder to justify.
My aunt got one and I helped her set it up and install software on it. These things were so cool at the time. It even had a built-in 3.5" floppy drive. I think it had a trackball and buttons instead of the touchpads we're all used to now.
I hacked my way through college on a Toshiba Tecra 750... $7,500 configuration that I was able to get for $900! Probably the best laptop I owned except for my current 2015 MacBook Pro.
The most impressive laptop I ever owned was a Libretto. It was more than a decade before another laptop came around that gave that same feeling (the Macbook Air).
Libretto 30 owner clocking in. It was amazing to have a portable device that fit in a "poacher" pocket and could browse the web and play mp3 files in 1998.
Toshiba Portege, at about 1.1kg IIRC, was pretty incredible, around the time the Macbook Air first came out, lighter than the Air but with a DVD drive. It was my travel work laptop, before netbooks became a thing.
It felt quite plastic though, nothing like a Macbook Air (which I got pretty soon after). Mechanical drive too, I seem to recall - I still have it upstairs and have it pencilled in as a first Linux laptop for my son.
The Libretto! I had completely forgotten about my Libretto 100, which I carried with me to class and took notes on, as well as used in the field to debug HW issues, using the small dock and connecting field HW to the serial port. I took that quirky little laptop all over the world with me in my travels. It was thick and sturdy, so I wasn't too concerned about protecting it, as opposed to the ultraportable laptops nowadays, which are so thin and wide that I have to mind what happens to it. There was also a small and friendly community of Libretto owners which would share tips; I recall disassembling the laptop and soldering on more memory, based on some guides from people in the Libretto mailing list.
It's a shame because they made such outstanding products at one time. I was given a Toshiba laptop as I headed off to college in 1995, and it still boots (to Windows 3.11) 25 years later.
100%. My first business was buying/refurbishing/selling used laptops. I bought/sold tens of thousands. Toshiba was by far the best. IBM was 2nd. Now they’re both gone.
The only things I liked about my early 2000s Toshiba laptop were the physical volume control knob and manual wifi switch. Software controlled volume seemed so stupid in comparison. I still think laptops should have both if these switches as well as a physical camera and microphone switch. You can't ( realistically) hack past an air gap.
The Toshiba T1000 was the first portable computer I ever used, touched, or saw. It was a miracle: LCD screen, battery power, real keyboard. It felt like something snatched from a time traveler. (Except it booted from MS-DOS 2.1 hard-coded in ROM. I had to boot DOS 3.2 from a floppy.)
I have a Toshiba Portege R500 in a cupboard somewhere. It was a very impressive machine. It's extremely light at less than a kg (particularly compared to others at the time). It has an SSD (albeit on some weird interface). The keyboard is also rather nice. The most interesting part is the transflective screen which works in direct sunlight. One nice point was that Toshiba repaired it free of charge when the screen broken off due to a korfball incident.
It's a shame they've exited when they used to have such innovative machines.
My first ever laptop, and in fact first ever computer that I did not share with someone else was a Toshiba Satellite A100 that I purchased when I was 22. I actually needed it for a job I got (not having a computer provided was in hindsight a bad sign) and the company was so bad I left in 3 months. The Toshiba was a decent laptop though until 3 years later I switch to a Macbook, and have had Macbooks since. It seems many other people followed that same path so sad as it is, it's not a surprise.
My first laptop was a Toshiba T1000 around 1987. I thought I was quite the high roller traveling around with that thing. MSDOS and a 640x200 display - those were the days.
[+] [-] IOT_Apprentice|5 years ago|reply
Beyond that, Toshiba was a company in crisis. They announced all sorts of forward looking partnerships via press releases and had powerpoints about them, but allocated ZERO budget to implement them.
They ordered their existing units (seemingly hundreds of business units) to stay the course on obsolete and non-competitive products that were not generating revenue any longer.
Their cloud and "chip to cloud" plans were Potemkin villages, devoid of tech or investment.
Their PC division was non-competitive with flash storage, even though Toshiba's disk division INVENTED flash storage (and that was unpopular in that division--it went to market with much opposition, driven by ONE guy).
Toshiba basically played fortress Japan, where they made handshake deals with other moribund Keiretsu would just cross sell to each other.
They were being out innovated on all fronts, and were paralyzed to make the big changes, as the culture was one of never rocking the boat, and hanging on till retirement. The dream was to retire and perhaps be asked to consult back to the company.
The same thing was going on with the other firms there, like Sony et al. Disruption, the cloud, open source and innovation just destroyed a firm with an amazing historical legacy.
[+] [-] numpad0|5 years ago|reply
Darker blue is operational profit and lighter blue is sales total in ¥100mil.(~$mil.)
Just like an oscillating power circuitry! Can’t make this up and they couldn’t have been more engineering oriented than this.
[+] [-] umvi|5 years ago|reply
Edit: I believe the tweet is referring to the 2015 accounting scandal (listed on wikipedia here[0]), more information on how it happened here[1].
From what I understand, the oscillations come from the fact that corporate leadership handed down profit targets for business unit presidents to meet, with the expectation that failure to meet them = you're fired. So the business unit presidents worked with accountants to fudge the numbers at the end of every quarter to meet the unrealistic targets. Then the numbers would revert back to reality at the start of the next quarter. Corporate leadership was only looking at end-of-quarter numbers so they just kept increasing the (already unrealistic) profit targets year after year? Or maybe they understood what was going on but liked the effect it was having on their stock options/bonuses/whatever, so they kept perpetuating the fraud? But then again, why allow profits to revert back to reality, why not fudge profits all the way to hide the oscillations?
My vote is on corporate leadership incompetence. When you have a dictatorship-like culture of strict obedience, you start having an information propagation problem. Your underlings will suppress information they know you won't like (because you'll punish them) and will only feed you the truth when convenient. They will also outright lie if they have to, to save themselves from your wrath.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#2015_accounting_scanda...
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshi...
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] system2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
I'm still not sure exactly what's wrong with it. The original hard drive ended up with a corrupted MBR, then the replacement drive i put in ended up with the same thing within a day. I just ended up retiring it and getting a new one.
Though for a while though i was keeping that thing on life support by running a linux distro partitioned across 4 usb flash drives just so i could keep using it for a bit longer. I managed to recover everything off the drives that way too.
By comparison, the acer i replaced it with ended up needing a screen replacement within 2 years and that thing just pretty much hung out at home.
[+] [-] keanebean86|5 years ago|reply
My only complaint is the cheap plastic case has deteriorated so it's partially held together by tape now. I also had to replace the screen hinges a few years ago.
But compared to the Acer before it (2008 bad Nvidia GPU) and my wife's trash HP laptop the Toshiba has been worth every penny.
[+] [-] Crazyontap|5 years ago|reply
A shitty courier company apparently loaded a fridge over one corner of my laptop while transporting it (don't ask why or how it happened) and the end result was the laptop broke at the corner (imagine loading 200kg on side of a fibre glass plate).
Long story short the hinge popped off, the laptop's display bottom totally teared up and yet lo and behold it's still working since the last 5 years. It looks like a Frankenstein laptop but it works flawlessly and never has given me any issues. My asus laptop on the other hand.. :/
[+] [-] yread|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oska|5 years ago|reply
Just looking now at wikipedia, I'm sure that we sold the T1000 [1] and T1200 [2] but I'm not sure if we ever sold the T1100 [3] (their first model). We also sold the T3100 [4] which had a gas plasma screen that was quite a wondrous thing at the time. It was also very expensive. They were mostly bought by higher level executives as a status symbol. My father kept one for personal use too.
It was a very profitable business to be in at the time - margins were high, unlike the razor-thin margins of today. But my dad didn't capitalise on it as well as he should have. He overpaid his sales staff when they really weren't having to make much of an effort to sell such a hot item. And he didn't pay enough attention to the accounts so that when the recession of the early 90s arrived and government departments stopped buying he hit a cashflow problem and the company went bust. But there were a few good years before that and I still remember the Toshiba laptops of that time quite fondly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1000
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1200
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100
[+] [-] f00zz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubix|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSycqXoxIzI
No company would even joke about behaving like that on an airplane today.
[+] [-] acomjean|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agloeregrets|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zumu|5 years ago|reply
Afterwards it found a second life as my favorite travel / bedside laptop until a glass of water claimed its life a few years back.
[+] [-] bxparks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdeibele|5 years ago|reply
I bought protective shells for them and that made a huge difference in longevity. The kids would tend to pick up their computers by the top/screen and could crack the screen or knock a connector loose.
The speakers on it are also decent, which my kids appreciate.
I really don't see how people can use the typical Chromebook with its 1366 x 768 screen except that it would make you focus solely on what was on screen.
[+] [-] encoderer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|5 years ago|reply
Prior to that I acquired this guy donated through the local 2600 chapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg and submitted an nmap fingerprint for its DOS-based, parallel-port driven TCP/IP stack! Good times.
[+] [-] jcims|5 years ago|reply
Also got a job offer to work at McMurdo Station on the south pole after getting them up and running on a few laptops. Never took it due to some matrimonial commitments, but did get a cool hat and pin out of the deal.
Good times. (It's Doogie if anybody that worked then is in here)
[+] [-] dmead|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thom|5 years ago|reply
But what I really wanted (and still occasionally look up on eBay) was one of the tiny Librettos. Never took the dive though and as the years passed the spec became harder and harder to justify.
[+] [-] Yhippa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
I had a couple of Dells after that but they never felt as robust as the Toshiba.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pravus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregschlom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalentine007|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|5 years ago|reply
They were the best at the time.
[+] [-] phreeza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
It couldn't do both at the same time.
[+] [-] barrkel|5 years ago|reply
It felt quite plastic though, nothing like a Macbook Air (which I got pretty soon after). Mechanical drive too, I seem to recall - I still have it upstairs and have it pencilled in as a first Linux laptop for my son.
[+] [-] shard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znpy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|5 years ago|reply
Then IBM became king with the ThinkPad.
[+] [-] dewarrn1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cabinguy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bondolo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmkb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxk42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhayhegde|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xioxox|5 years ago|reply
It's a shame they've exited when they used to have such innovative machines.
[+] [-] ajeet_dhaliwal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] W-Stool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ht_th|5 years ago|reply
I remember the fun I had playing games, learning to program in basic, and writing reports with WordPerfect 4.2.
[+] [-] dasb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _emacsomancer_|5 years ago|reply