by Al Massey
It’s truly fitting that the world’s largest technology showcase COMDEX, is held in that Mecca of glitter, Las Vegas. The city of sin is a reflection of our industry, all flash and no substance. Cubical rats everywhere will move toward the light and listen in rapt attention as the Bablefish explain once again why this years whatisit is far, far better than last years. Not only that but it is faster and bigger and more “intuitive” and represents a “paradigm” shift in the market. I just love fall COMDEX. I wish P.T. Barnum were alive to see it.
I had a call from some on-air personality the other day that wanted to interview me for National Public Radio. He wanted my take on the Computer industry. I guess he thought I had some rare insight that I should share with the great unwashed. These interviews give me a chance to reflect the “state of the industry,” but I can’t see where my insights are any better than anyone else but here goes.
The computer industry (I include all high-tech industries in this category) is pretty much divided into two schools. One school develops a really neat thing-a-ma-gig that holds a lot of promise. Something that we absolutely, positively, can’t live without, and if we could live without it we wouldn’t want to. The only trouble is the darn thing simply doesn’t work. That doesn’t stop us from buying it because we really want to believe in the promise, and besides, version 2.0 will fix all the bugs anyway so why worry.
School number two however, produces a really great product. It works well right out of the box, does everything it claims to do and you are not stuck with upgrading every three months or downloading bug fixes every week or so. The thing works! Only one little problem, nobody wants it.
Which brings us to perhaps the biggest problem this industry faces. Standards! Backward compatibility and superior performance be damned, if you want a modem, spreadsheet, web browser or CPU then you are going to have to buy MY modem, spreadsheet, web browser or CPU. I really don’t care if it’s the best or not, I just want MINE to be the STANDARD.
3COM, Rockwell and Lucent wage war over modem standards, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel square off, Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation do battle and then Digital wireless telephones take up arms over GSM, TDMA and CDMA. This is a never-ending battle.
Sometimes you will see a truce but more often than not, someone wins and the rest lose. In the end the really big losers are you and me. The larger the company and the larger the installed user base the bigger the standards issue becomes. For the most part a company will spend vast amounts of money on PR in order to convince the user their product will emerge victorious and become the industry standard. They approach the market in a positive manner and expect to win.
They announce an upcoming product in the hopes of freezing a rivals sales. This often is a dangerous move and is known as the Osborne Effect. You remember Osborne don’t you? If not go study up on him. Volumes have been written about him. Osborne was brilliant and had a really great product. That is to say the product worked some of the time. It was a portable computer back at the dawn of the Personal Computing industry.
Osborne was a pretty good showman and had the ability to convince folks that his NEXT model was going to be WAY COOL and have a bunch of nifty features that his present model lacked. So those folks just decided to wait until the NEXT model too but thereby killing off Osbornes cash flow and business. He went the way of the wayward wind.
The NUMBER ONE problem with the industry however is marketing or a lack thereof. I have never seen an industry so inept when it comes to marketing. I guess I spent entirely too much time around the automobile industry where the creed was always “move iron.” Selling is the number one priority in the auto industry and those without any selling ability were weeded out fast. In stark contrast to the auto industry is the software industry where selling comes in a dismal last.
This is an industry where a marginally intelligent bean counter can write a business plan and float an IPO quicker than you can say Netscape. He then uses the money to hire the best coders he can find to act out his fantasy and come up the he next great Gazaooka with a WOW factor of plus ten. By the time the money starts getting short and the Vulture Capitalist want to see product on the shelves, he has very little left to hire a competent marketing team. Notice I said marketing. Marketing and sales are two distinct processes.
By the time this gets turned over to sales the poor guy has to resort to selling vapor to the end user. If sales can get their hands on a product that is seventy-five percent ready they can do a masterful job of bringing it to market. This rarely happens in real life so they end up practically giving the product away and charging for installation and consulting. If it looks like the product has a truly great WOW factor then some other company will buy it and fold it over into their existing line or kill it off altogether so it won’t present any competition.
If I sound a bit jaded it is probably because for a good number of years now I have been spending my days hanging out in the high-tech field. On a slow day I will get about twenty-five calls from someone telling me about their latest and greatest. This is followed by over two hundred emails a day and probably upward of fifteen faxes. FedEx, UPS and Airborne Express all know the way to my door.
The biggest perk of my job is that I get to see the latest and greatest software and hardware our industry has to offer. The biggest downside is that I get to see the latest and greatest software and hardware our industry has to offer. A really great day is when something works, even marginally well, right out of the box. I have been known to dance a jig and shout at the top of my lungs when that happens.
Finally, just as I was about to close this article for the month, I get a Press Release from the company that is once and forever the best and the worst of what we have been discussing, Microsoft. Nobody is able to put a spin on product news like Microsoft. I love hearing from them.
It says here in this Press Release that Microsoft plans to release Service Pack 1 (beta) for Windows 98. A BETA Service Pack? How original. How many betas will it take to get a final release Service Pack. Maybe the final version will ship in time for Release 2.
Now here’s the good part, Microsoft originally planned to release a number of Windows 98 fixes and updates as a service pack — later renamed as a multimedia enhancement pack — shortly after it shipped Windows 98 on June 25.
The company changed its plans and opted instead to post to its Windows Update web site new features and enhancements, such as DirectX 6.0, upon completion. Microsoft said the change in plans was due to a lack of bugs in the product.
Get it? They changed their plans because of a lack of bugs in the product. How many of you out there are Windows 98 bug free?
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member who can be reached at almas@hal-pc.org
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.