From: The Founder
         Popula Winter HQ,
         1 Piazza Del Popula, Bora Bora
         Far Far East

To: Nerve Center Staff
         Divisional and Regional Office Heads
         Consuls and "Military Attaches"
         (Foreign Capitals and Major Cities)
         Presidents of All Wholly Owned Subsidiaries
         Domestic and Foreign Government Lobbyists
         Fifth Columnists in Competing Corporations
         Etc

Subject: Popula Resolutions For The Coming Century

(China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore Please Note: Implementation is expected in the Julian year – don't worry, you'll get a separate memo when it's your turn).

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Greetings to all from Popula Winter HQ, and official warmest regards. I'd like to take this opportunity at the turn of yet another century or thereabouts, to remind us all of our goals, missions, objectives, standard operating procedures, raisons d'etre, knots in hankies and so forth for the coming hundred years and, indeed, on a continuing basis.

The Winds of Change, as you know, continue to storm through the Corridors of Commerce. In this age of Steam and the Machine, the reach of those of us who provide aid and comfort to the lumpenproletariat has been tremendously extended. The time when a typical firm would produce a local product for a local prole is rapidly fading. Instead, vast faceless corporations like ourselves produce the same product for citizens far and wide, from Toronto to Taipei and from Taipei to Timbuctoo, and so on and so forth.

This has some very beneficial consequences. Production on the large scale, for example, reduces unit costs and, hence, prices. Two chickens in every pot, and so forth. There are also, however, dangers. Generally speaking, for instance, your globally mass produced one-size-fits-all Item is inferior to the real thing – not to an intolerable degree, perhaps, but enough to disturb the perfectionist and those with nostalgic tendencies. Ask any real connoisseur of coq or, for that matter, vin.

More parlous than this, though, is the distillation of power into the hands of a few vast faceless corporations like ourselves. Once you've put your Window thing into every computer, for instance, you can treat the hapless owner as cavalierly as your caprice dictates. You have him (and, in these days so distant from the age of chivalry, her), as the saying goes, by the short and curlies. Moreover, when the vast faceless corporations gang up the problem is compounded: VFCs are merging like so many giant amoebae -- at such a cracking pace, indeed, that in the foreseeable future Messrs Standard & Poor will have trouble coming up with the necessary 500 public companies to fill their famous index: In fact, at the current rate, according to Box-Jenkins, our VP Statistics, we will be reduced, by the turn of the decade, to watching the S&P 3. Where will the hapless consumer then be, one asks?