Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

November 16

Another week of delusions breaking up await. The last tidbits of information before the deluge from the end of the previous week include, several editors at MacWeek finally taking notice that Apple's online prices aren't the great. Another shocker - Apple's are still more expensive than PC's. Well ain't that a earth-shaker. Personally I was surprised that they were only as expensive as they were. After seeing their high-end laptops reach for the 8 thousand dollar barrier, I expected to see outragous prices for hard-drives and memory tacked on within their "build your own mac" section of their website. After all, if 10 thousand suckers would shell out 4 times the market rate for SIMMs during the days at NeXT, why not try it again? The prices NeXT charged for their components were so outragous, that people would order their NeXTcubes and NeXTstations, pared down to the basics and load them up elsewhere. Of course in most of these instances with narry a NeXT qualified tech in sight, they were throwing their waranties to the free-winds. The lesson has been lost on Silicon Graphics who still charges hefty prices for memory thus offseting what would otherwise be reasonable prices for their still-hip looking hardware that is getting the snot beat out of it by Sun and NT class workstations. And you thought the movie Toy Story was done on SGI's like Jurassic Park? Try a render farm of Suns. For their next movie - with the project name "Bugs" - they'll probably be switching to cheap NT farms instead. Put that one on for size. The golden boy at Apple, knows something that he isn't telling everyone else. Besides using IBM Thinkpads during his sermons at the podium, he uses Microsoft NT on Intel workstations. The HORROR, the HORROR! Why wouldn't his own people at Pixar toe the line of Apple? Why can't they "think different". Because they are a tight budget ship that has contracts with Disney. IE: they have real corporate goals with real corporate budgets. And if cheap pig-iron works, then it's cheap pig-iron used. Funny thing is, if Stevey Wonder can't bring his own businesses to use Apple's, what hopes does he have of convincing the rest of us?

November 17
It's interresting comparing the marketing and visibility efforts between Apple and the rest of the computer industry. One of the most visible barometers of how a company is doing, or at least it's mindset with the marketplace, is it's presence at Comdex - now the largest geek love-fest both in the industry, and in history. When a company gets into a fiscal paranoid mindset, their ability to cheerlead their products at this show degrade gradually - from all out hype spanning massive collaberate booths, down to the minor hucksters on the mezzanine level having private showings. Their not really private showings, in most cases. They're called private showings because they're so invisible against the normal psychadellic background of marketing chaos, that they are practically undetectable - and are usually a waste. The ones that land in limbo are new entrants who are on the start of the product curve - and thus may have a future - or veterans in serious fiscal trouble and can't afford to blow the heavy bucks in all the nickel and dime crap that usually gets rung-up in such shows. Seriously, I always wonder if the mafia invented the industry trade show. Aside from the massive expense of the floor space, they'll charge you for everything but the air in the place to breathe. Next year they'll be adding that to the cost manifests surely. Only a robust company can afford this, so it's easy to see why Microsoft builds a small city everytime they attend. Comdex is the show that seperates the stars from the has-beens. Atari is a great case in point. Like IBM, Sony, and Microsoft, they had a sprawling presance in every show they attended. That is until Time/Warner pulled the plug on most of the company and it was sold into the pockets of someone who barely had the money for a belt. Let alone belt-tightening. Instead of having the resources necessary to put on a face typical with consumer electronics or computers, they dodged both the CES and Comdex. Within two years it was generally assumed that Atari was out of business altogether since they had effectively vanished from the public and retail eye. This actually wouldn't happen for another decade, but since no one saw them around, the worst-case scenario was already put into the public's mind. Given Apple's no-show, we can see where the public gets these crazy ideas that Apple is a doomed company.

November 18

More Comdex musings? Yes please! Even MacWeek is getting a taste of the obivous. Looking at the various loogies being hawked in Las Vegas, you find new 500 dollar PC's, configurations for every niche and verticle market, new storage devices, new designs, and new arguments on how Java is the end-all be-all while Bill Gates doesn't really give a damn, and would rather get more cheap PC's out like televisions instead. You've got palmtops, TV set-tops, and show girls hyping the scene with hardly anything covering their tops. What you also have is a desperate attempt by the PC industry to stop doing the same thing as last year. In a world of falling margins and cheap components, real innovation regarding use and variety is the new religion. Market segments are now getting smaller, but are still being targeted by PC builders that will invest time and energy in building the box for their needs. What's missing from the party is Apple. Apple has long since abandoned being the computer maker for everyone, and has re-focused it's efforts on making the best macs possible. That kind of focus, is what 6 year old boys apply to ants on a sunny day - and it's Apple Computer that's going to fry. They may apply themselves to make the best Macs in the world - but for who? What market would place large scale investments on old-tech that then needs to be shoehorned into the way they do business? All the new hot markets out there want scalable, customizable architecture that runs the industry standards so they can invest time in knocking out custom databases. Not muck about trying to make the Mac fit-into their schemes. This is why NT is beating the snot out of Unix. NT isn't perfect, but it holds a lot more managability over all the hackney'd Unix protocals out there. For years Unix has been twisted into many environments that weren't suited to use it profitablly. Now people are leading the charge away from them because NT can be as simple or as complex as necessary, and doesn't eat up a department of 12 to make the damn thing work every day. These same people don't give a fig about hip or coolness, they just want the best tools to get on with the job. And as the months tick by, Apple is looking less and less like a tool for anything in particular. The problem is that the combined weight of so many licenses of Wintel shifting their weight behind whatever market segment had a need, overshadowed what ever one single meager Apple could do. Apple spent so much time focusing on the GUI, that they didn't notice that people like the Bloomberg L.P. - a titan in the custom information and news business - don't even use a mouse. Why would they? There's only 2 million market segments to follow, you think they all have icons representing them? It's small wonder they use Windows NT because they like to build everything. NT allows them to focus their efforts on their own custom databases and even design the computers to run them on. This frees up time to do their job, in stock contrast to whether they'll be able to integrate a Mac into the office because Joe-Art-Slob says they're the coooolest. If you really want to know Microsoft's secret for world domination? They actually listen to what the customer needs so they can sell and license more solutions. Apple want's you to subscribe to what-ever brain-fart they have that year. Guess which approach is winning?

November 19

Yippie - Apple shipped the Blue Box-Mac emulation shell to developers. Did you miss the spontanious parades breaking out in your metropolitan district? Hear any champaign corks popping in the hallways of your office? No? No kidding. Aside from the irony of succeeding in making an otherwise sophisticated spruce goose of an OS - Rhapsody - act like a devolutionary deralict of the computer age, there's just not much interrest in such things anymore. It would similar to Ford announcing that they've taken a Mustang II and were able to replace the fuel system with something from a Pinto. Yet for Apple it means that at least their current installed market base of saps, won't have to jump ship immediately because they won't be orphaned. At least not by Apple's R&D efforts anyway. What it does mean is that developers like Adobe can drag their heels porting million of lines of application code to Rhapsody, and continue to ignore it in favor os supporting the status-quo on the Mac under Blue Box. I mean come-on. There's nothing - and I mean nothing - running on Rhapsody today after it's decade old slide into obscurity via NeXTstep. The idea that all of the major applications would suddenly transform into Rhapsody native versions anytime soon, is not only laughable, but remote. It's not unreasonable to forshadow that they never will. I mean comeon. If you're going to invest your time and energy in a new API for your application to run on, why not make it for something with a future like Windows NT and 95? Well here's a shocker - most developers are. Aside from the general portability and scalability of the 32 bit language set, allowing for more flexable applications in more markets, there's just a bigger pent-up demand from more customers to see more stuff on the tools their using now. That's why several MacOS ports to Windows recently were held up. They wanted to be totally Windows savvy rather than be another hackney'd half-assed recompile of code. Why would they take so much care to do the long approach? Because Adobe is now making more than half it's revenue from people using PC's and it's not hard to guess that this will hit 75%+ by the end of the decade. When you've got 90%+ of the planet using standard screwdrivers, it's a lot easier to justify the R&D budget to make screws for them. Over at Apple though, they're begging everyone to start making more Phillips-head screws for their unstable end of the business. No, no, you've got to be Rhapsody native now - otherwise we'll look like one collosal joke in the marketplace. Well, nothings going to stop the yucks on this one, because there's no justifiable reason to develop massively expensive ports of well-entrenched apps for a market that hasn't even had it's first offical customer yet. That's why NeXT failed so bad the first time around. But then Apple's always had a hard time with history repeating itself.

November 20

As much as I like irony, I recall why for two years I jumped back on board with Apple after floundering with NeXT - before noticing that both were shams and getting a Thinkpad. Back in 1993 NeXT was in the tank, but there were still two graphic designers who were attempting to actually get film output of the various ads they were kicking around. They were having a hell of a time. The way the OS was handling the postscript code was a compromise at best, but usually just a disaster. Most pre-press heads didn't know how to make heads or tails of the files they were recieving, and they only occasionally went through the various machines that produce the material used for print publications. After a stint at Pulitzer and other production venues, I knew that all this was complete crap. If I was to get serious with graphics, I needed to follow the standards that were already out there rather than lug-wrench nonstandard workflow into a system that was ill trying to digest it. I went back to Mac in this case, and got a couple more years of work done with the standard tools of the time. Now that those tools are available on the PC, I migrated in a heartbeat, and things are still chugging away nicely. The fact is, unless you've got the tools that people need, people are going to be reluctant to jump-ship. That's why it's taken the design community so long to migrate at all away from Apple. But for the same reasons they can debate the merits of Photoshop for PC vs Photoshop for Mac - and how there's no intrinsic difference - they may find themselves finding all kinds of compromises in a short time. Because - baby - NeXT is coming to Mac in a major way. I can't fathom why any graphic designer would be interested or excited about Rhapsody, because after a decade of it's previous incarnation, I can safely say that all graphic-design related projects that I attempted in those sorry days were nothing less than unmittigated logistical and technical disasters. If that's what's coming down the pipe from Apple, I'd be jumping ship with little regard for the lifeboats. If there's one thing that's going to push more of the graphic communtiy into Windows it's not going to be the allure of Digital Alpha workstations running QuarkXPress like a bat out of hell, it's going to be the realization that the damn printers don't have the Rhapsody drivers to get drafts out, and the person at the service shop can't get any film to output from his Lino/Agfa. When the blame starts to pass around on the lateness of the project and how accounts are now in trouble due to all the technical snafus someone is invariably going to want to get something done, and will order a consignment of PCs when the next upgrade cycle begins. There will be a wierd mass-awakening when this happens. It won't be "gee Apple is great, and Rhapsody is even better" it will be, "The damn Macs don't work anymore - get something in here that works".

November 21

I love it when standardization triumphs over ego. Ego says, the world revolves around me, and I refuse to change to whatever trends might be relevant. Standardization says - fine, you're fired you insolent prick! This scenario is happening in offices all over the world as information technology administrators decide that they'd rather only muck with one set of systems, not many of them. The cost of administering a system is irrelevant when it's compared to how many systems one has to administer over. It's wonderful to hear bias about the cost of maintaining a Mac, but the real truth is that when you have a bunch of rotten Apple's sitting in the middle of an otherwise functional Wiltel network, getting the Macs to behave becomes a time consumer. Of course the reason they're still there is often due to office politics from people who just "can't" live without their Macs. When the time to upgrade rolls around they often find themselves in front of a shiney new PC that they loathe. Some of them decide that they won't "dare" touch it until they are willingly fired, or move on to find another job. Well, they've got one hell of a job search ahead of them. As the last of the 5 year tax depreciations run out, upgrades involving Macs are few and far between. And since most employees that can complain about such things, are just payroll puppies - rather than people who have money on the line actually running the buisness and have to answer to investors about why redundant waste isn't being addressed - they are going beyond the bounderies of ego when they complain that they weren't being consulted when the PC only policies were being handed out. In this case the employees of Hughes are fretting and fuming that they won't work with PCs now that a Wintel only policy has been instigated at the IT level. Well tough cookies bright boy, you don't need to work there either. Most technically litereate folk will often throw away one calculator for another brand as long as it adds numbers. When someone protests that they can't add numbers with the new calculator because some of the buttons are in different places - that person doesn't look like an educated martyr, they look like a frigging moron. And I don't think human resources wants to be known as a sponser of morons. Lord knows, that's what government is for. So tip-one if you want to keep your job at Hughes. Shut-up, learn how Windows 95 or NT works, and get on with your job instead of sounding like a bunch of babies. Because I can assure you - your boss doesn't have time for whiners. He does have a drawer full of little pink pieces of paper for them, though.

November 22

The first reason I started using computers in my profession was twofold. One, I'm lazy - and if I can get the same work done with less effort - I'm a happy camper. Two, regardless of the bells and whistles, if there's a standard tool to get the job done, then I'm in. Before the Mac was seriously considered a contender in the Graphics community, there were heated debates between the Amiga and the Mac. These were as banal as the fact that the first generation of Macs couldn't even display color - so how serious of a tool were they? Unlike the Amiga, I had a postscript engine under the hood that handled professional color. Even if I couldn't see the color - I knew that the information would insure the best color output when I went to print with my material. The idea that the Mac was nowhere near as fun as the Amiga - didn't stop it from being more productive. Today, the same argument applies. Windows 95 may have some major differences in overall look and feel, but serious tools for today's business are available for it. This simple fact, wins out on arguments embedded in how neat the damn thing is in comparrision. My roomate in college would often crank up his stereo and geek-out on some virtual entertainment and make careful sarcastic note of the color, the clarity, the stereo and the multitasking. All I was doing was pushing around bezier curves on a tiny 9 inch black and white screen, making crude illustrations - albiet ones ready for 4 color film output. Eventually, one of us got paid to do the same tinkering that he did earlier on his college computer. Here's a hint - it wasn't the person playing the video games. Now people are getting paid to run projects on scalable servers for custom-end databases, while taking maximum advantage of network connectivity and serving vast forms of client data from the same operating system across the planet. Other people think it's neat that Quake runs faster and in better resolution on the Mac. Guess which OS is going to fall into hobbiest obscurity this time?