CREATIVE STRATEGIES

Creative Strategies was founded in 1969 by Larry Wells and David Norman. These two men were at SRI and had a vision of creating a high tech research firm and originally wanted it to be part of SRI. At the time, SRI was not interested so they left to start Creative Strategies. The two worked together at CS until 1971 when David Norman decided to leave and start Dataquest. Larry Wells continued to grow Creative Strategies and in 1974, sold it to Business International, a global business consulting... organization who wanted a high tech research arm to supplement their various consulting practices around the world. In those days, Creative Strategies was well known for their major reports about many technology issues. Their original focus was on the impact of mini-computers on next generation business practices as well as researching areas such as storage mediums, WW communications and international data traffic. An interesting factoid is that not long after Apple introduced the Apple II computer in 1978, a summer intern named Trip Hawkins wrote what became the first study about personal computers. At the time, Hawkins was at Stanford and worked at Creative Strategies during the school break. Interestingly, that report was read by a young Steve Jobs who challenged Trips assumptions. Hawkins asked to meet with Jobs and not long after that meeting, Jobs hired Trip to become the first director of market research at Apple. After Hawkins left Apple, he founded Electronic Arts and has been a pioneer in the PC industry for decades. In 1981, Creative Strategies current president and principal analyst, Tim Bajarin, joined the company and became their first full time PC analyst covering what was the birth of the PC industry. His original project was to work with the IBM PC team and with their staff he studied the trends in retail, business and consumer demand for personal computers. He was also a consultant on the original IBM laptop project that eventually became the ThinkPad brand of portable computers. During those early years, he also worked on projects for Compaq, HP, Apple, Adobe and Epson as well as Software Publishing and Lotus. Consequently, he was an eye witness to the birth of the PC industry. In 1984, Business International wanted to close down the San Jose office of Creative Strategies and move the staff back to NYC where their headquarters are located. The management team at the time, led by Ed Poshkus, did not want to make this move and instead offered to do a leveraged buyout so that the company could be independent and continue to cover the world of technology from Silicon Valley. Business International agreed to this plan and for the next 10 years the company continued to be a leader in traditional technology related market research. In 1994, the original partners who bought the company from Business International wanted to either retire or move on so Tim Bajarin took over the company and moved it from a mainstream market research facility to one that focuses more on high tech consulting and specialized tech research. Today, Mr. Bajarin and his team cover all aspects of the PC industry as well as the consumer electronics markets, serve on many industry advisory boards and provide various programs and services to many of the major companies in these industries.More