Doing Business : Singapore Inventor Rockets to the Top of Computer Specialty : Sound Blaster is music to the ears of stockholders. And Sim Wong Hoo has some more innovative plans.
Seated in his office in a drab industrial park here, Sim Wong Hoo bridles at the notion that innovations in the world of computers are invariably born in the United States.
The founder of Creative Technology Ltd. is the mastermind behind Sound Blaster, a widely imitated hardware-software package that allows computers to play high-fidelity music, imitate the sound of a glass shattering or synthesize the human voice.
The product has become an essential ingredient to legions of computer nerds who thrive on authentic sound effects in computer games, for which the Sound Blaster has become an industry standard. Sim has sold more than 2 million Sound Blaster boards at $99 each.
Creative Technology was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in the United States only this last August, but the stock has already leaped from an initial offering price of $12 to more than $18 a share. While not quite in the category of Bill Gates of Microsoft--one of America’s richest men--Sim and his two partners have become millionaires (in dollars) many times over, and Creative is now one of Singapore’s largest listed companies.
“It wasn’t luck, it was hard work,” said Sim, 37, who founded the company on a shoestring budget of only $10,000 in 1981.
Though Sound Blaster now has 40 competitors, Sim reckons he can beat the odds by coming up with innovative designs and manufacturing in-house in Singapore, where costs are still relatively low.
In fact, most of Creative Technology’s 600 employees occupy three floors of a peeling factory building here--a far cry from the high-ticket real estate of Silicon Valley. In the wake of his success, Sim now drives a Lexus.
Sim set up the company soon after IBM announced its first personal computer, with the goal of making his own inexpensive clone. He was joined by a childhood friend, Ng Kai Wa, and another engineer, Chay Kwong Soon, with whom he attended accordion classes. All shared an interest in music and electronics.
Sim’s first product was a soundboard for an early Apple computer that enabled the machine to speak Chinese. Next came the Cubic 99, an IBM clone that featured a number of technical innovations--among them a soundboard capable of speech or playing music. It was called the Talking Computer.
“The computer was very hard to sell,” Sim said. “It was so complex the sales pitch was two hours long. In addition, we had to write complicated software and then give it away.”
After another failed attempt to produce a computer, Sim and his colleagues designed a simple sound device from their basic computer design. They eliminated the sophisticated speech technology and introduced it in the United States as Game Blaster. When attached to a computer, it enabled users to play music on a computer keyboard.
An American company, Adlib, was already in the soundboard business, but Sim flew to the United States and moved into a San Francisco townhouse, which he used as his base of operations. By cajolery and persistence, Sim convinced designers of game software to write programs compatible with Game Blaster as well as the Adlib hardware.
“We were always the stepson, always catching up,” Sim said. But the persistence paid off. Sim added back the speech synthesizer and called the product Sound Blaster. He slashed his prices and sold the soundboard in Radio Shack stores.
“Sound Blaster had everything the market wanted. It became an instant hit. All the major software supported it,” Sim said. Within six months, Creative Technology was shipping 10,000 add-on boards a month and industry leader Adlib filed for protection from its creditors.
The success of Sound Blaster attracted the attention of industry giant Microsoft, which invited Sim to join an industry committee to set standards for the coming era of multimedia computers, combining pictures, text and high-quality sound.
Sim surveyed the market and decided that the impediment to multimedia was data storage, because the pictures and sounds take up enormous memory when stored. The solution requires CD-ROM, a CD player adapted for the computer but selling at prohibitively high prices.
Sim approached Japanese manufacturer Matsushita and formed an alliance. Now Creative Technology sells a multimedia package with Sound Blaster, a CD player and software disks for $795.
While Sound Blaster captured 60% of the soundboard market, the multimedia kit has about 80% of its niche, Sim said.
Creative Technology’s latest product line is the Video Blaster, which converts video signals to digital signals so that a user can watch television programs on a personal computer. The Video Blaster also allows the user to grab a digital still frame, which can be useful to people who design graphic presentations.
The company has also refined Sound Blaster to allow musicians to generate lifelike musical sounds from their computers, replacing a $2,000 device.
“Our charter is to take high-end products to the mass market, to take those $2,000 items and make them widely available for $200,” Sim said. Recognizing that the principal market for computer products is still the United States, Sim has set up a research and development facility in Milpitas, in the heart of Silicon Valley. “In the States, there is more interaction with other companies such as IBM and Microsoft,” Sim said.
