In the mid 80’s, I visited the Hanover Fair in what was then...

In the mid 80’s, I visited the Hanover Fair in what was then West Germany. I spotted an interesting bit of materials handling kit and purchased the smallest version available.
Back in Oz, we set about making a better mouse trap.
We believed the weakness in the German product was its control system. We wanted ours to be superior in a standalone environment, but more importantly, to be easy to interface seamlessly with bigger host manufacturing and distribution systems.
Remember, this is 1985.
We wanted our product to be capable of solving / improving as many applications as possible - it wasn’t what it was, but what it could do.
Suffice to say, it was a hit in Oz and beyond.
In the early days though, it was tough going. Back then, being a locally made product up against the world’s best was akin to women in the workforce - you had to be twice as good to be considered the same.
We set up tailored simulations of how it could work for individual companies on what was then state of the art - a Compaq ‘portable’ PC, known as a luggable. Prospects would sit gazing at the screen, seeing how it could work for them - feature, function, benefit.
Because funds were short, we started by demonstrating it to what we considered to be the most obvious applications. We made sure our early installations worked a treat and used them as reference points to sell to others. We got into one industry player, and soon others were beating a path to our door.
You might say why is he rabbiting on about this?
Well - I look at what our battler’s doing, and see many parallels with what we did.
Have faith Coppers, nirvana is fast approaching.