From issue 43...  early 1998... my first ever Epilog column. Apple got SO excited by it that Guy Kawasaki emailed me and asked if he could reprint it out to his Apple Evangelist list... And it doesnt seem to have aged at all in the last 10 years.  Wierd.

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Epilog43

With my consultant’s hat on, I often get asked to recommend hardware for evaluation by businesses and corporates. And its true to say that no-one got fired for buying Compaq, IBM or HP. Sometimes some Gateways or Dells escape into the offices of users and do sterling service. But there is one name that is often strangely missing. So I went on a hunt to see what they were up to, to see whether they could offer a solution for real-world desktop operation in a connected, wired office space.

I have this beast sat in front of me right now. It’s fast, very fast. It is easy to use. It runs Office 98. In fact, I’m typing this into Word 98. It runs FrontPage. And there’s Microsoft Outlook for connection to my Exchange Server email backbone, and I can see my inbox just fine. It has Internet Explorer 4 on it, and Netscape 4 as well. And a big suite of Adobe tools like PageMaker, PhotoShop and so forth. In fact, in terms of software, it has everything you need. It has an Ethernet network connection, peer networking, a nice 17” monitor, full Internet connectivity. Stereo sound too, and a microphone. And a CDRom drive, and a big hard disc. And a very sensible floppy disc arrangement too. The keyboard isn’t bad, and the mouse is perfectly nice.

It is, indeed, the very essence of a modern multimedia computer for home or office. It runs all the sensible software that I want and need to work with, and works with all the other machines around it in the office. The price/performance is competitive too. So it should be on my Recommendable List.

And yet you are not buying it.

It has plug and play that works, far better than the PC to its left. Hardware expansion is no problem – it has room for plenty of storage, and the internal PCI bus takes name-brand industry standard cards. You can plug in several monitors at once, and get a desktop that spans all of them. It doesn’t suffer from stupid limitations like 16 IRQs, and being unable to use a modem on a port near a mouse.

And yet you are not buying it.

This machine has more name-brand current-version software dripping out of its hard disc than you can shake a stick at. Its from a company that has arguably done more over the last fifteen years to further desktop computing than all of the mainstream PC vendors put together.

And yet you are not buying it.

And I look at it, and to be honest, I’m scratching my head. This is a product with a staggeringly bright future, whose operating system today, although a bit creaky in places, is very competent at performing the business and home tasks that you care to throw at it. It runs all that software and integrates with your Novell or NT network, so what’s the problem? And the next major release of its operating system, due months before Windows NT 5.0, will bring back into the fold some fabulous, tried and tested work that was initiated nearly ten years ago. Best of all, this new OS will run on the native hardware, and there is a complete Intel build of the OS too. But if you want to stick with Microsoft OS’s, there’s a runtime for NT and Win95 too so you can run the apps there.

And yet you are not buying it.

If I worked for this company, I would be tearing my hair out. You, dear reader, are quite happy to buy hardware that is appallingly backward, where “prehistoric” doesn’t even begin to do justice to some of its more 1960’s let alone 1970’s thinking – when was the last time you thought rationally about that parallel printer plug, for example? How can we justify column inches and learned discussion about the pros and cons of Intel’s Slot One for the Pentium II processor, when the surrounding machine architecture is so full of utter rubbish, and bitter, twisted nonsensical design? The parallel plug, a keyboard bus that requires a separate mouse port, shared IRQs for the serial ports, the AT bus, base port addresses – the list is endless! Hardware configuration and BIOS’s that look byzantine in their complexity – just what is a “post-refresh burst rate delay” anyway and do I want one, two or four of them? “Plug & Pray” speaks for itself, and is often a bigger headache in the corporate support world than the problem it was attempting to solve.


We’ve still have ISA. EISA failed, PCI64 has gone nowhere. Limited, if none, hot plugging or fault tolerance in mainstream machines. Where is the industry push for good technology like Firewire or even USB? And look at the operating systems – one wrong configuration, and you’re stuffed. “Have you tried reinstalling the OS?” is a statement that brings tears to the eyes of an IT manager. PC 98 spec is a decent enough step, but why is this specification PC98 anyway – why wasn’t it PC90, or even PC87 when the 386 shipped?

In the PC marketplace, whether it be SOHO or corporate desktop, this is just yet more “me too” so-called engineering wrapped up in “all tinsel and no Christmas tree” bullshit. A lowest common denominator “it’ll do” illness, and a cost cutting frenzy par excellence, pervades most everything that most vendors do. No wonder PCs are so expensive to maintain, when the ingredients are this bad. Ask yourself why TCO is such an issue now – when was the last time you thought about TCO on your phone system? Or a fridge?

And you wilfully part with your money for this stuff.

Maybe there was a reason in the past not to buy into the computer that I’m referring to, but I am hard pushed to find one today. My mother wanted a computer to “browse that Internet thing”. She now has one of this brand I’m referring to, and mum@woodleyside.co.uk (please be gentle!) is now a live email address. She browses the web with gay abandon, and is reassured by the happy smiley “system ok” face she sees when she turns the machine on.

Now I will accept that this company has done some stupid things in the past. But that was then. They are now making money. I accept that there were good reasons for corporates not to buy into this platform in the past. But that was then. Maybe, just maybe, its time for a fresh look?

I have a brain. I have an Apple Macintosh. What’s your excuse?"

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