Renaming to Obic: from selling machines to selling software (1974)

Whose logic sets the price

What Obic gave up in the 1974 renaming was the place name in its title and the occupation of office-machine dealer. As long as it moved a manufacturer’s hardware, the supplier decided the price, the delivery date and the cycle of new models, and what remained for the agent came close to freight and installation. When Noda Yoshihiro began calling a reservation system the product and the machine the raw material, he was declaring that the basis of pricing had moved from the cost of the equipment to the customer’s own operations. Here, for the first time, a company that had started as a technical group of six brought its reason for employing engineers into line with its explanation of its business.

The same shift also settled how the company would be built. Once you decide to own the software, you have no choice but to keep people who can write it on the payroll — and the graduate-only hiring, and the Flex Library that stocked reusable parts in-house, are both demanded by the product rather than chosen beside it. OBIC7, the integrated business suite released in 1997, has the same construction as OFFICE in 1980: reduce each industry’s work to standard components and sell those. From January 1974, when it handed back the name Osaka Business, this company never once went back to lining up boxes of accounting machines.