crane@fortune.UUCP (John Crane) (02/02/84)
You probably won't hear this from anybody else, so I think it's time somebody played the devil's advocate with respect to the MacIntosh. Before I do, I will say some good things about the Mac so you won't think I am totally negative. First it will probably save Apple from getting eaten alive by IBM. Second, Apple's stock should go back up. Third it does use a lot of novel ideas and makes them affordable. Fourth, they'll probably sell a lot of machines. But not to me. If I was in the market for a personal computer today and wanted only the current functionality available on the MacIntosh, I would sooner buy a Kaypro or a Chameleon and take the money I saved and buy a printer. I find Apple's marketing approach (though superbly timed and coordinated) to be insulting to my intelligence. "You don't have to memorize all those commands". So WHAT'S WRONG with memorizing stuff? Is it really that difficult to learn new things? Apple is taking the typical American marketing approach: create a need where it didn't exist before, then come up with a bunch of features to meet it. Tell everybody how stupid they are and how difficult it is to use computers. Make everything look really dark. Then, voila! spring the answer -- the mouse!! Really, you need a mouse with a word processor or spreadsheet like you need automatic transmission. It's a nice feature to have but you can learn to get along without it. My question is. Is the extra functionality worth the extra price? I'm afraid that this message won't get home to consumers amidst all the glamour and hoopla. Now for the finale. Last year the buzzword was integration. You couldn't possibly function in the office and keep your boss happy without integrated software. Where's the integration with the MacIntosh? Can we forget about integrated software now? The only Mac I get is going to have sesame seeds on top of it. John Crane
seaburg@uiucdcs.UUCP (seaburg ) (02/04/84)
#R:fortune:-241500:uiucdcs:10400108:000:1033 uiucdcs!seaburg Feb 3 22:33:00 1984 You are obviously a computer user. (You got a note here, right?) The point of the Mac is to reach new POTENTIAL users-- those people who are afraid of computers (for whatever reason) and don't want to spend time memorizing commands and reading manuals. I too am a fairly proficient computer user (even if I can't spell), and I probably wouldn't buy a Mac because I understand the concepts related to computer use and learning the commands wouldn't be too difficult for me. But the 'average' person isn't that familiar with computers and for the most part doesn't want to read manuals. My father (who has a PhD in Civil Engineering - so he's no dummy) recently bought an IBM PC and has yet to read all the documentation. Since computers are going down in price, and since they can be helpful for many tasks, many more people will be tempted into purchasing computers. The companies who make their computers easiest to use (while being functional and versatile) will sell more of their computers. ...pur-ee!uiucdcs!seaburg
guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (02/05/84)
> I find Apple's marketing approach (though superbly timed and coordinated) > to be insulting to my intelligence. "You don't have to memorize all those > commands". So WHAT'S WRONG with memorizing stuff? Is it really that > difficult to learn new things? I agree that the marketing approach to the Apple is annoying, but not because the idea of a different type of user interface is unnecessary. I find the tone of the claims about the mouse to be irritating; they seem to imply that the mere presence of the mouse is what makes the Mac wonderful, not the idea of designing a user interface around the availability of fast and convenient pointing devices. Even if it isn't difficult to memorize or learn new commands, if you can avoid doing so, why not? It does take some work to learn a "traditional" command syntax, and it does take some memory capacity; why not put that brain power to better use? Knowing all the intricacies of "nroff", for instance, may be fun, but being able to avoid dealing with them is more fun - the reason a person works with "nroff" is not that they want to learn something neat and new, it's that they want to produce documents. > Apple is taking the typical American marketing approach: create a need > where it didn't exist before, then come up with a bunch of features to meet > it. Tell everybody how stupid they are and how difficult it is to use > computers. Make everything look really dark. Then, voila! spring the > answer -- the mouse!! I agree that their tone of "before we invented the mouse (a slight exaggeration, but the names "SRI" and "Xerox" appear *nowhere* in their ads), computers were impossible for anybody who wasn't a computer wizard to use" is typical annoying marketing hype. The mouse has been around for a long time before Apple appeared on the scene, though, and many people from novices to wizards speak well of them. Lots of academic systems have them, Xerox is using them heavily, and Sun, NBI, and everybody else building a UNIX desktop bit-mapped-display workstation seems to be using them. I've used the mouse on the Star and the Lisa, and the desktop user interface is nice (I'm curious how far that interface style can be pushed; how about a desktop-oriented shell or "make"? Remember, the current "OS types a prompt, you type a command back with the syntax <verb> <options> <objects>" user interface is an idea that was prompted by the advent of computers with interactive printing terminals, so the appropriate user interface may be conditioned by the technologies available.). > Really, you need a mouse with a word processor or spreadsheet like you need > automatic transmission. It's a nice feature to have but you can learn to > get along without it. My question is. Is the extra functionality worth > the extra price? I'm afraid that this message won't get home to consumers > amidst all the glamour and hoopla. Again, just pasting a mouse or icons onto the side of an existing system isn't the major advance that the computer companies are shamelessly touting it as. However, "now that we have a convenient pointing device and a screen on which we can put complex images, what kind of user interface would we do given a clean slate?" is a question worth asking. It may produce a lot of dumb ideas, but it's worth a try. > Now for the finale. Last year the buzzword was integration. You couldn't > possibly function in the office and keep your boss happy without integrated > software. Where's the integration with the MacIntosh? Can we forget about > integrated software now? Unfortunately, what's happening is that there's a lot of marketing hype about new and useful ideas which drowns out the contents of the idea. It's nice to be able to represent data in a fashion that permits multiple styles of accessing them; for instance, the ability to take data from a spreadsheet, graph it, and put the data and graphs into a document along with figures from a database and paragraphs from a report you got by dialing into a news service and send that report out by electronic mail. Unfortunately, people with minimal understanding of what useful ideas like different user interfaces or integrated software get into the loop and suck all the semantic content out of the words describing those ideas, turning them into buzzwords. The Lisa's software is fairly well integrated; the Mac doesn't have as large a collection of Apple-written applications so there's not as much to integrate. If you have a word processor written by one company, and a spreadsheet written by another, and a terminal emulator written by a third company, etc. the chances are good that it'll be hard to move information between their files. Yes, you can live without a desktop-style user interface and an integrated collection of application software. But it's a lot nicer to have them, and if you're starting a system design you might as well do it right if it doesn't cost much more. Guy Harris {seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy
grunwald@uiuccsb.UUCP (02/06/84)
#R:fortune:-241500:uiuccsb:4400036:000:1353
uiuccsb!grunwald Feb 5 13:24:00 1984
What I don't understand is their big university-oriented push and the
consequent interest in places like CMU, Harvard, Dartmouth and so on. It
does not seem to be the machine to require your students to buy.
I like funky interfaces and everything, but christ, an M.E. student wants
to be able to solve ODE's (or whatever they use) for stress analysis. What good
is the integrated display for this? I imagine they'd rather have an FPU.
For writers and managers who need to publish cute reports, I can understand
the appeal. But could you imagine using this as a software production machine?
It would take so much more work to develope a program like "make" in that
enivornment because you'd want to include all the human factors considerations.
In fact, with "make", you really don't need all that -- you just want it to
work and compile your programs for you.
Now, I could see a multi-window, multi-tasking environment for program
development; however, with no memory management hardware, I don't think we'll
see it on the Mac for a while.
It seems to be a system better aimed at the buisness departments of schools
instead of the engineering campuses. Unless they develope some interesting
packages for it, I think it'll mainly compete with the IBM PC market for
buisness use. But, I imagine it'll keep them afloat for a while.robertm@dartvax.UUCP (Robert P. Munafo) (02/07/84)
x
I don't know about your univerity, but my university (Dartmouth) is
*not* requiring students to buy Macintosh computers. Some of the
employees are being required to *use* Macs, but aside from that they're
not pushing it on us at all. The college will have college-owned Macs
available for use to those students who do not buy their own. Some of the
computer programming courses will involve programming Macs (in BASIC,
probably).
!uiuccsb!grunwald seems to be a computer user, and, like John Crane
does not realize that the great majority of people who will be in the
market for these things are not experienced in programming, operating
systems, USENET, etc., like most of us are. This includes roughly 95%
of the students at Dartmouth, and most of those students at other colleges
involved in the Apple University Consortium.
Robert P. Munafo ( ho hum . . . ) ...!{decvax,linus}!dartvax!robertmpreece@uicsl.UUCP (02/10/84)
#R:fortune:-241500:uicsl:7000049:000:646 uicsl!preece Feb 9 09:54:00 1984 There's nothing wrong with memorizing commands, and one would expect regular users to learn a lot of commands. On the other hand, I know people who can't figure out how to use the tab key on a regular typewriter. I don't know about CMU, but at Dartmouth the vast majority of students aren't engineers. For the Dartmouth student the ability to write papers on the machine, access the library catalog, and do a relatively modest amount of programming (in, I suppose, True Basic) should suffice. The Mac appears to be a rather nice package for that. I wich they'd open their discount package to alumni... scott preece ihnp4!uiucdcs!uicsl!preece