The small American firms that surrounded us at the convention were a story in themselves. Though the crowds were attracted to the flashy shows in the center of the exhibit floor, the companies who were developing the exciting new technologies that proved to be the engine of growth for the entire industry were all right around us.

Even I didn’t realize to what extent this was true. There was a booth across from us run by a small New Jersey firm called Dialogic. Sitting across the aisle for an entire week, I noticed a particularly energetic tall saleswoman who was working Dialogic’s booth. What was particularly striking about this woman was that the colors of her high heels and lipstick were always perfectly matched—bright red high heels, bright red lipstick on Monday; on Tuesday orange high heels, orange lipstick; on Wednesday hot pink high heels, hot pink lipstick; and so on. I was so impressed by her ability to match colors that I missed out on discovering one of the world’s greatest companies years before it became famous. Dialogic is now one of the hottest companies on Wall Street. Unfortunately, I noticed the lipstick, but never bought their stock. Today, any company that wants to control telephone switching with a personal computer is familiar with Dialogic cards. These essential computer peripherals have revolutionized telecommunications.

Dialogic and other small to mid-sized companies that we saw in Geneva were responding to the real needs of advancing technology, which demanded that everything that had been done on a million-dollar mainframe yesterday had to be done by a thousand-dollar PC today. This is business technology at its purest, responding to the real needs of the market. This is in sharp contrast to another form of expensive self-aggrandizement I’ve enjoyed watching big companies pursue. That is, they try to establish themselves as the leaders in whatever the latest trendy new technology seems to be. These companies will spend billions of dollars providing “interactive” cable services to a few hundred cable subscribers in some test market. They run to tell eager Wall Street analysts that their company is leading in the latest hot technology and so they’re definitely the company to stay with. Usually these same companies totally ignore improving and concentrating on their core product line.

To give just a couple of examples, consider the automobile industry. While Japanese automakers were looking for ways to improve the fuel efficiency and reliability of their cars, General Motors was using its high cash surpluses garnered from the sales of soon-to-be-outdated gas guzzlers to purchase Hughes Aircraft. Honda, in the meantime, had in 1976 invented a totally new process that pushed gas mileage through the roof, allowing Honda, up to then principally a maker of motorcycles, to leapfrog the American automakers with the Accord, eventually displacing the Oldsmobile Cutlass as America’s most purchased car.