Story #5 From the Brink of Bankruptcy: How We Turned Crisis into Triumph

"The company might go under"

After the release of the product, complaints began pouring into the support center. The issue was that when using Ichitaro (a Japanese word processor) on a computer, it would suddenly stop working. It turned out that version 4 of Ichitaro had several bugs in its program.

As days passed, the phones kept ringing incessantly. Support and sales staff worked tirelessly to handle the situation, but all they could do was apologize. The truth is, there were unavoidable circumstances that forced the rushed development of version 4. It had been decided that the software would be pre-installed on Hitachi's "PROSET" computers, and it was essential to meet the product's launch date. However, that was no excuse. I gathered the employees and apologized: "It was my decision to rush the release. I am truly sorry."

Version 4 was eventually recalled from stores. It was a heartbreaking decision, but moments like these test the true value of a company. We launched an all-hands effort to recover from the situation. Engineers remaining at the headquarters in Tokushima worked every day to update the program and conduct tests. Debugging is a relentless process—fix one bug, and another emerges. We had no choice but to tackle this tedious task diligently.

After several interim updates, debugging was finally completed with version 4.3 of Ichitaro. It was finished in November 1989, more than six months after the initial release of version 4. I’ll never forget the overwhelming emotion when we completed the master version of 4.3.

But it wasn’t the end. We had to regain the trust of our customers. We decided to distribute version 4.3 free of charge to all existing users—a total of 230,000 users. The cost was approximately 1 billion yen (roughly 5 million GBP at the time), a significant burden for us at the time. I addressed the employees and said:

"This might cause the company to go under. Even so, we’re doing it."

Thus, we released version 4.3 to the public. The flood of complaint calls ceased. Sales figures from stores nationwide were aggregated daily, and the graphs posted on the wall began to show an upward curve. We had overcome the crisis.

In the end, version 4 became a massive bestseller, with cumulative sales of 630,000 units.

Just as we thought we had overcome one of our toughest challenges, a new battle loomed on the horizon—a fierce competition with none other than Microsoft.