THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700


August 26, 2000

03 00050 61 00082601



Mr. Morris E. Jones
Business Unit Manager
morris.jones@intel.com
Cable Network Operation
Intel Corporation
350 East Plumeria; Mail Stop CHP3-105
San Jose, CA 95124

Subject:   Business Plan Support
Medit Improvements

Dear Morris,

The past several weeks, during your review of preliminary business plan ideas submitted on August 4, I have done a little more to streamline SDS so there are fewer function keys to remember. The program, including Internet support and transfer operation can now run on c, which makes it easier to install for others. This effort, summarized in the record on August 24, revealed the need for Medit improvements which we have discussed, beginning on August 12.

Is there a DOS command or utility available for deleting empty directories, so that if we enter something like...

rd c:\sd\wt

...maybe with a switch or something, the thing will look at every directory below c: sd wt and remove every non-empty level back to c: sd wt?

I noticed rd has a switch to delete directories and files, but suppose we don't want to delete non-empty directories, just empty ones?

Can you help?

This sounds like something your ff.exe might do? It supplements the need to fix year 2000 problem we discussed on August 5, and again on August 12.

Savx is another small improvement needed for Medit. We actually need an alternate command like, say...

savc

...that creates directories and files in lower case when specified by the user.

Medit code can be downloaded from the web.

SDS makes it a lot easier than using Word, Outlook and other methods being tried and considered for Enterprise Management to reduce mistakes and improve earnings, under reasoning Bill DeHart discussed July 9. Experience the past few months at SRI shows SDS is a unique and powerful solution. SDS might be described as the...

Little engine that can...

...perform Knowledge Management, solve meaning drift and deliver intelligence anywhere, anytime, as planned on October 21, 1997.

You may recall, Howard Hughs is reputed to have hired out incognito to an airline company at a time when that industry was just starting in the 1920s. He was thinking about buying an airline, but needed market research, as you have proposed for SDS to discover the level of effort required to deliver a new service to customers, and to see first hand the reaction of customers in order to guide his business planning. In those days, the pilots doubled as baggage handlers, so Howard, again reportedly, worked for several weeks to learn about using airplane technology for a new business of passenger travel, by flying the plane, handling the baggage and dealing directly with customers getting on and off the plane. Bill DeHart did this market research for several months at PG&E, and reported favorable results, but he is not in a position of influence at PG&E, as Howard Hughs was in his company.

We need this kind of experimental research to break out of the innovation loop that arises from looking for market history on SDS, when none exists because SDS is the only application for Knowledge Management. Where there is a lack of market history, Andy Grove proposed that executives experiment , like Howard Hughs did, to break of innovation loops. What do you think about pilot testing SDS to flesh out market research requirements for business planning?

Thanks.

Sincerely,

THE WELCH COMPANY



Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net