Following on in the grand tradition of the continuing skirmishes that appear
episodically on this list regarding the Mac vs. the PC and the HP3000 vs.
UNIX, I've appended below the first few paragraphs of two articles that
recently appeared in the New York Times.
Both articles are similar in that they report on two, non-mainline products
for the Mac and PC platforms. In one case, it's a scanner; in the second,
it's an infrared link. But read more than the words, if you don't mind. The
Macintosh author uses the word "Joy" in his title, and is obviously excited
about what he can do, and intersperses the entire article with jokes. In
contrast, the Windows 95 reporter is far from being a happy camper. Indeed,
it's obvious that he's clearly more than irritated. There probably wasn't a
single joke that came to his mind as he wrote his article (sarcasm, of
course, doesn't count). Only the first part of each article follows below
simply so as to not violate copyright laws too badly, but please take my word
that the tones of each article do not change when the articles are read in
their entirety. The Mac author simply puts in more jokes; the PC author just
gets grouchier.
Perhaps level of satisfaction doesn't matter much when the subject of
discussion is a personal computer -- but "joy" does translate directly into
dollars saved and dollars earned when the computer platform is a
business-critical database engine. The significant difference between the two
articles below doesn't lie in the products themselves, but rather the
fundamental design approach taken. In one, an "open systems" approach is
adopted. In the other, a well-engineered, well-integrated, optimized approach
is used.
Ultimately, the second approach is the only one that is going to succeed. If
computers recapitulate the history of cars, the only people who will
eventually buy a car as an "open system" (where you have to buy the seat
covers, fenders, and fuel injectors from whomever manufactures those parts --
and put them together yourself, trying to resolve "system" conflicts and
incompletely adhered-to "standards") will be teenagers and neophyte
mechanical engineers.
Business people are not dolts. Business usage of computers is almost the
entire reason that computers exist in the quantities and low prices that they
do now. But, sooner or later, it will become apparent to everyone how
expensive and what poor productivity any "open systems" design represents.
Indeed, I wouldn't give the current trend more than another 5 to 10 years
before there will significant demand for something that works easily and
well, for designs that have been well-optimized by a single vendor who will
take responsibility for the macine (in its entirety) in the same manner that
GM or Toyota takes responsibility for their products.
Client/server/Distributed computing is the "front end" of open systems (in
both senses of the phrase) -- and a rather profound disillusionment in the
technique has already set in, long before most people have even begun to get
it to work.
Wirt Atmar
================================
THE JOYS OF COLOR SCANNING
By PETER H. LEWIS
c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service
Even without opening the box, one can guess that the new Apple color scanner
is not flawless. If it were, someone at Apple Computer Inc. might have used
it to scan in a bunch of $20s and $50s (the new $100 bills are harder to
counterfeit) and then send them to a color laser printer to help offset the
company's financial losses.
Wait! Only kidding. It is illegal for anyone but the government and certain
Internet start-up companies to manufacture money.
But the new scanner, formally named the Apple Color One Scanner 600/27, is
good enough to inspire such thoughts. At a retail price of $599, it delivers
an impressive array of features for Apple Macintosh owners in the home or in
the office.
Flat-bed scanners have been around for years, but this one has the best
combination of performance, ease of use and low cost of any I have tried.
Part of its appeal is that it is based on Macintosh technology, which means
that installing the Apple scanner itself is less likely to cause a nervous
breakdown than installing comparable Windows-based products. I did, however,
develop a nervous tic until I figured out that on my model at least, the
``lock'' and ``unlock'' features were reversed.
The software is impressive, too. The Apple Color One Scanner 600/27 comes
with a program called Dispatcher that enables the user to scan, edit, copy,
convert, print, store, retrieve and fax images from the computer screen. (The
printing and faxing features require a separate printer and fax modem.)
There are many uses for a color scanner, most of them legal.
The most common application, as far as I can tell, is converting color
photographs into computer files that can in turn be used in sundry ways. By
the time I am through with this stack of family photos, I will be able to
insert their smiling faces into letters, desktop-published calendars and
E-mail messages, among other things....
================================
LIFE IS EASY; SOFTWARE IS HARD
By STEPHEN MANES
c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service
All I wanted to do was keep the files on my laptop computer in sync and up to
date with the ones on my desktop machine. How hard could it be?
In the world of computers, asking that question means you do not grasp the
complexity of the problem. The answer is almost always ``harder than you
could possibly guess.''
The floppy disk drive for my lightweight subnotebook has to be plugged in
from the outside, but an infrared transceiver is built in. So when I bought
the little machine, I ordered a transceiver for its big brother. The Jeteye
ESI-9680 from Extended Systems Inc. hooked up to the spare serial port. Soon,
I thought, I would be swapping files over pulses of invisible light.
Soon? Like a Christmas toy without batteries, the Jeteye arrived with no
software whatsoever; I am told this problem has since been remedied. A couple
of technical support calls later, I was told to find some free software of
dubious quality that had been tossed in with my laptop and copy it to my
desktop machine. If that failed, I could try downloading a fix from the
software vendor's on-line bulletin board or pay for an upgrade.
But then I got wind of what seemed like good news: the Microsoft Corp. had
released its new infrared drivers for Windows 95. I would simply download
them at no cost from Microsoft's Web site and be off and running.
As you have no doubt surmised, a forthcoming paragraph will begin with the
words ``Two hours later.'' Finding and downloading the software was easy. The
hard part was trying to fathom the 14-page on-line manual; its ``Quick
Start'' section quickly went downhill from the ominous, ``Have fun
experimenting with wireless IR links between your computers and printers.''
I did plenty of experimenting, but it was not my idea of fun. Being able to
use your laptop computer to fiddle with files on your desktop machine
involves blessing both machines with not only the infrared drivers but also
software that the manual dryly notes ``is not installed with the typical
Windows 95 installation recommended for most computers.''
Two hours later, after unearthing my Windows 95 CD-ROM and deciphering some
vague remarks in the infrared driver manual, I somehow stumbled on the
requisite configuration, whose logic would have been unassailably
understandable to Chico Marx. The machines now reported ``infrared
communication on COM2, providing application support on COM4 and LPT3'' and
were using a ``direct cable connection'' to communicate without wires....
================================
(Now that you've read the PC article, go back and read the Mac article once
again, if you don't mind -- and try to put yourself in the place of the two
authors. We have hundreds of customers on the HP3000 that express that same
level of joy to us everyday. Joy has to count for something. Indeed, I've
come to believe that it is perhaps the most important metric of all. Jeff
Brown of Merck asked, "Which platform would you put your money into (an
HP3000 or HP9000)?" I would put 100% of my money into the HP3000 -- if
business results, obtained at highest possible levels of productivity and
profitability, were what I was after.)
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