Author: Steven Schwartz
Date: 08:19:39 10/19/00
Go up one level in this thread
On October 19, 2000 at 05:46:19, Francesco Di Tolla wrote:
>On October 18, 2000 at 13:45:26, Steven Schwartz wrote:
>
>>We received notification of the lawsuit in 1985 and the trial
>>took place in 1991.
>
>May I ask a thing that is not clear to me: what was the issue?
>regards
>Franz
Back in 1984 Fidelity announced that they were going to be
manufacturing an "over 2000 rated machine" that would sell for
"under $100". It was called the Excellence.
We, as usual, were very skeptical. As holiday season, 1985
was approaching, we asked several dozen times for samples of
the machines so that we could test the actual strength. Each
request was met with some excuse why we could not have samples.
If memory serves me correctly, the day before the Chess Life
ad deadline, we received two Excellences.
While Fidelity was telling us that they had not a single machine
to supply to us, they had entered several of them in a tournament
in Florida. Luckily, we had several customers who were attending
the tournament, and they were able to test the MHz speed of
the machines and found that they were running at 8 MHz when the
production model was set to run at 3 MHz. We knew this because
we ran a problem and asked the customer to run the identical
problem on one of the units at the tournament.
Naturally, Fidelity was not planning on announcing the faster
speed for these specially prepared tournament machines, but they
were ready and willing to announce the actual results of the tournament.
We waited until the last second (literally) to submit an ad to
Chess Life (the U.S. Chess Federation magazine) because we wanted
to get the results of as many games as possible so we could
print as accurate an estimate as possible.
The ad that we decided to print promoted a Saitek TurboStar as
playing "over 2000" for "under $200" on half the page, and based
upon the results that were phoned into us that afternoon, we used
the other half of the page to promote the Excellence as "over 1700"
and "under $100". The "over 1700" rating was based upon the
tournament rating at that point of about 1850. Since the
production models were only going to run 38% as fast, we
calculated that 1700 was a fair estimate. The consumer was
NEVER supposed to find out that the models in the tournament
were not identical to the ones that would be sold.
Fidelity was not pleased. After all, they spent almost a year
hyping the Excellence as playing "over 2000" and here, their
best dealer, was not singing the party line.
So, what does Sid do? He sues us for $1.5 million dollars for
the business he claimed that he lost as a result of our Chess
Life ad. It was ludicrous, but we had to defend ourselves,
and we did.
Two VERY odd things happened.
1) Sid found out about the ad BEFORE it actually appeared
in Chess Life (which meant that someone at the USCF had to have
leaked the information about the ad to him).
2) We received notification of the suit less than one month
after the ad was published. This meant that Fidelity was claiming
that the 1.5 million dollar loss occurred in a period of perhaps
3 weeks.
Since the plan, in my opinion, was to do business with the USCF at
the exclusion of ICD/Your Move, the suit was the proper smoke
screen to allow Fidelity to refuse to sell product to us which
is what happened. Sid could also use the suit to show all his
other dealers two things:
1) That ICD/Your Move was "wrong". After all, if you bother
to sue someone, you MUST be right.
2) That other dealers better sing the party line or else they
could meet the same fate.
It is my understanding that the Federation sold plenty of
Excellences that season, because THEY advertised the machine as
"Over 2000" in their ads in the magazine without having any
information but what Fidelity told them.
In reality, if EVERY single member of the USCF had planned to
buy an Excellence and if our ad prevented EVERY single person
who read the ad from buying the machine, then their damages
would STILL have been less than 1.5 million. Despite the fact
that Fidelity saw our ad as so damaging, there had never, ever
been a chess computer up until that point that had over a 1700
rating but cost under $100, and we had over 100 pre-orders which
we could not fill because Fidelity would not sell to us.
What WAS the Excellence rated? I do not really know, but looking
back on it now, probably 1800 or so. I think we were doing our
customers a service, but, as you can see, that is not always
rewarded.
Steve (ICD/Your Move Chess & Games)
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