by Al Massey
I spent a delightful afternoon with Jim Carlton of the Wall Street Journal recently. Jim is West Coast technology reporter for the Journal and has just penned what is sure to become the definitive American tragedy — “Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders.” Jim’s publisher, Times Books, had sent me an advance copy of the book and I could hardly wait to visit with Jim.
While the story of Apple’s founding and the rise of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are stuff legends are made of, little has been written about the demise of Apple in recent years. In interviewing some 160 current and former executives and employees and al most as many outsiders, including Bill Gates, John Scully and Gil Amelio, Carlton was able to bring new insights into the collapse of an American Icon.
Carlton told me that he was able to persuade Bill Gates to make public for the first time a 1985 memo in which Gates urged Apple to license the Macintosh operating system to make it an industry standard. Having traveled the slippery slopes of the silicon valley myself and interviewed some of the same people I was particularly interested in how Carlton went about dealing with such egos as Gates, Scully, Jobs, Suns Scott McNealy, Andy Grove and Jean-louis Gassee. “Simple,” he said, “I sprayed myself with a large quantity of ego-repellant twice a day.”
If you want to find out more about the high-tech arena and how not to conduct business this is a must read. ISBN: 0-8129-2851-2
“How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a light bulb? Four. One to change it, one to rewire the socket so that Netscape light bulbs won’t work in it, one to rewire Sun’s light bulbs into something unrecognizable (and non-functional), and one to convince the justice department that all Microsoft light bulbs are conforming to anti-trust laws.”
When GTE Internetworking called wanting to “do lunch,” I almost passed. Lately it seems that every large company has decided this thing called the Internet is going to be around awhile and they had better lay claim to it. What better way than to spend a few bucks on lunch and tell some poor, unsuspecting soul that they “invented the Internet.” After years of swimming in a stagnant pond the telcos now want climb out of the ooze and mire and lay claim to this marvelous piece of technology.
When I saw that they had recently purchased BBN Planet and one of the technoids from BBN would be present they had me hooked. Names from my past came flooding by. The thought of BBN dredged up names like Roland Bryan, Vinton Cerf, Bob Kahn, and J.C.R. Li cklider. These were the true giants of the Internet and I must admit that GTE gained a great deal of legitimacy in teaming up with BBN Planet to bring Internetworking to the business community.
Dave Meitzen, Sandy Fairfield and Vaughn Harring explained that GTE’s strategy in purchasing BBN and forming an Internetworking division was to bring managed access to the Internet for small business and other organizations while providing a wide range o f other services which include round-the-clock network management, monitoring and problem resolution. Maybe so, it is going to be interesting to watch.
“I dunno what the big deal is with computers maybe not comprehending the changeover from 1999 to 2000. Was it a problem in 1899???”
I am trying to be good and not mention the Browser wars or Microsoft this month but it’s just such a target rich environment I can’t pass it up.
Now we have Texas, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Oregon cleaning their guns and getting ready to sic their lawyers on the Demon from Redmond. Although official investigations are under way it is unclear what the exact grounds of the possibl e suits would be, or if the states would be representing commercial plaintiffs. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. Let’s see “we don’t know what Microsoft might have done, or who they might have done it to, but we are sure they have done something to somebody so let’s investigate ‘em till they bleed money and then sue ‘em.” Send your sons and daughters to law school, folks, suing Microsoft is a growth industry.
As the evil tobacco wars are winding down the lawyers are running about trying to find fresh meat and it looks like they have the scent. As a federal judge was delivering a preliminary injunction against the company last week, representatives from the a ttorney general offices of nine states were wrapping up a meeting in Chicago on possibly coordinating a legal strategy against the company.
Unable to stir up much interest in the United States recently with his Appraising Microsoft conference, activist Ralph Nader was reportedly in Europe meeting with representatives of the European Union discussing the possibility that they might sue the co mpany. It just keeps getting better.
Silly Computer Book Names —“All Quiet on the Western Font”
The Netizens are getting restless and demanding more bandwidth and faster access to the ‘Net so I predict the wide availability of seriously fast connections is just around the corner. From the onslaught of press releases I have been getting lately it se ems the public is finally getting interested in cable modems both for their highspeed and always-on connectivity.
A recent communiqué from Covad Communications tells of their plan to bring fast Internet access to San Francisco via TeleSpeed. This is based somewhat on variations of DSL (Digital Subscriber Link) technology and is delivered over your existing copper ph one line. With TeleSpeed you get to choose your bandwidth from 14.4 kpbs (kilobytes per second) to 1.1 mbps (megabytes per second) at a price of from $90 a month to $195 per month. I have seen other plans such as this proposed for a number of areas aroun d the country so look for something like this in the Houston area soon.
I bring this up because to me it’s small companies like Covad that are going to quench the public’s thirst when it comes to providing fatter pipes to the ‘Net. I don’t know if it’s just simply neglect or top-heavy bureaucracy that keeps the major telcos from responding to the needs of the user community.
In closing I have just received news that, after a year or so of refusing to dance with each other, 3Com’s X2 and Rockwell’s K56flex now want to party hearty and this should benefit the user. They have agreed to adopt a new standard called V.pcm that, at press time, is expected to be accepted in January 1998. This should make wide deployment of 56K a reality with you and me being the beneficiaries.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member who can be contacted at almas@hal-pc.org.
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