Vampires in Space

Market Share

Bob asked me a very good question. Scary good. "If one were to remove all your other lines of business from your software business, how much market do you think you would have? For example: Your fusion power plants and your waste treatment and recycling businesses are not merely places where you sell software to other companies in those areas. You own facilities in each of those areas. Same model as the hospital software: You write all the software each business uses. Your rare earth mining and steel manufacturing are all space-based. You import the end results to Earth. You write all the software for those too. Makes sense in that how you mine and process something in no gravity or low gravity would be different in many important ways than doing the same thing on Earth. My point here is that by IE being a private company, you don't have to break out the profit from selling a metric ton of Yttrium from the fact that you buy no software from anyone else to support all phases of that."

Bob ticket off some phases on his fingers. He ran out of fingers on one hand as he did so. "Mining the raw materials in the Asteroid Belt. Purifying the material. Separating it into salable and usable for your other facility's products. Moving the purified results to Earth. Dropping the product intact to the planet. Distributing it for sale all around the planet. Reporting to the Government on your sales. All of that from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth shipment to buyers is your infrastructure. Your software. You make a profit from a physical, tangible thing. Or, for a different example, your space tourism business: Not a tangible asset like a steel beam but still: You make the Earth-to-space vehicle. A passenger version of your heavy lift delta wing. The smoothest ride to space available. I know: I went to the Moon for fun once. Until I was weightless, I could have been in an airplane."

We knew from research before this meeting Bob had been to the Moon on our transport. Heather asked him. "You have fun?"

Bob smiled in remembrance, then plowed on. "So much fun. You make the fuel your launch system uses via your recycling business. You own space stations and the Moon resort destinations. And of course, you make all the software. Not one line of code was bought from another company. We know for a fact IE does not have any Global products. It's all uniquely yours. The reservation system. The launch control. The tracking. The onboard control system. All the related aspects for financial reporting to various government entities. It's all yours."

"Ok. All ours. Agreed." Heather prompted after this long windup.

"When you sell software to a company that is not yours, it's your software repackaged for public consumption. You spent the money to develop it already for your business. That was the secret behind your taking the hospital business from global: You own hospitals. You did not buy a single bit of software from anyone for them. You wrote it all. All the financials, insurance company interfacing, medical tracking, patient records, and confidentiality — the place we screwed the pooch and lost the business — diagnostic equipment both hardware and software. On and on. It's all stuff you make for yourself. The costs to you to sell it to another customer are customer support, training, and packaging. You could undercut us ... Global ..." Bob separated himself from the company there. "... every single day of the week in any industry we both have lines of business in. Yet you do not compete. You do not even try. After all that setup, my question again is: if you pulled out your businesses, have you ever looked at what part of the market you own remains?"

This question Bob is asking goes directly to the core of something we do not like anyone to realize about IE. We do not attempt to take market share because our market share is exactly what we do not want people thinking about. Our company's relative dominance in a few places is not some genius thing Heather or I did. We are just the lucky ones to be sitting in these chairs when this came up.

Where we are today was started centuries ago by Helen. It accelerated when my Dad and Marvin started their practical inventions line of business. My part was convincing everyone humans were going to figure out that Vampires were real and that we needed to be ready. To be ready meant only had one option as far as I could see. Not being on Earth. Even with babies and voluntary turns, we are nowhere near numerous enough to take on the combined hatred of the human race. We need technological superiority and the high ground. We have an advantage over humans in space. Being Vampires, we are better suited for living off-planet. More radiation resistant. We do not lose muscle and bone like a human in low G either. When the Vampire Mutation Complex evolved, it was like it knew to build a version of humans that could survive in more extreme environments.