Granville Technology Group

» see timecomputers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

This one stayed inside one country the whole way through. Time and Tiny were sold to British households by British mail order, and later by a chain of British high street shops that advertised in British newspapers. Nothing about it was ever meant to leave. I am writing it from Ankara off the paperwork, which is the only way it can be written from here.

Granville Technology Group Ltd sat in Simonstone, near Burnley, on a site the company had named Time Technology Park after its own brand. Tahir Mohsan founded it in 1994 as Time Group. It built PCs and sold them direct, cutting out the retailer, which in the middle 1990s was still a genuinely aggressive way to price a computer. By the end of the decade it was calling itself Britain's largest computer manufacturer, and the claim held up.

The brands were Time and Tiny, plus Colossus, Omega and MJN further down. Tiny Computers had been a separate business that Granville absorbed, and the two names went on being sold side by side to slightly different buyers. Late on, the group added shops of its own under the name The Computer Shop, and grew that chain fast. Administrators later found the ownership of the brands genuinely hard to trace through the group's structure, which tells you most of what you need about how the whole thing was organized.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Time's customers were not people specifying their own parts. They were households buying a first computer, and the pitch was a complete box with a monitor, a printer and a bundle of software for one number. On television the ads used Leonard Nimoy, in character as Spock, which is an unusually good fit: buy this and you will be the logical one. That ran until august 2000, when the advertising account moved and Nimoy went with it.

The most interesting thing the company ever did was the 1999 free PC. You paid nothing up front and walked out with a Windows 98 machine, on condition that you signed up to Time's own internet service for twenty four months. The computer was the loss leader and the dial-up subscription was the product. That model turned up in a lot of places around then, in different national shapes, and it always worked the same way: the hardware is free and the line is not. Anyone who has had a phone bill arrive after a month of dial-up understands the trade instantly.

In the year to june 2003 the group turned over £207 million and made £2.5 million before tax. During the 1990s the Time side alone had reported £750 million of turnover across its run, selling into the UK, the Middle East and the Far East.

~ the day it died ~

By 2005 the management accounts showed losses of between one and two million pounds a month. PC prices had been falling for years and the margin on a mail-order box built in Lancashire had gone with them. Suppliers were tightening terms. Forty staff were let go in the week of 20 july.

On 27 july 2005 the bank stopped processing card payments. That is the actual moment of death, and it is a mundane one: a retailer that cannot take a card is not a retailer. All 78 branches of The Computer Shop shut that day. Grant Thornton were appointed administrators, decided almost immediately not to trade the business on, and set up a phone line for customers holding unfulfilled orders and warranties on machines nobody was left to repair. About 1,600 people lost their jobs.

Two counts circulate for the shops. Wikipedia says the chain grew to over 300 stores; The Register, reporting on the day, counted 78 closing. Both are probably right about different moments, which is its own summary of the last two years.

~ what got buried with it ~

The brand did not quite die. In march 2006 Time UK reappeared as a smaller operation, supporting the machines and selling on, and the Simonstone site was eventually sold by the administrator to other tenants. What ended for good was the model: a British firm assembling its own PCs at scale for British consumers.

Escom had gone the same way in Germany nine years earlier, and Dell was already doing the direct thing better than anyone in Europe could. The window in which a regional assembler could undercut the big brands closed once components stopped being the expensive part. After 2005 buying a PC in Britain meant buying a Dell, an HP or an Acer through a shop that had never touched the inside of one, which is the arrangement everyone lives with now.

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