First Quarter, 1996

Table of Contents

Presidents Column

[sorry, our MUG President was out sick, no doubt due to all the stuff he bought and won at the expo! - Ed.]

This is a short newsletter, primarily consisting of first-hand thoughts gathered during the San Francisco MacWorld Expo, held January 9-12, 1996.

The area between the two main exhibit areas was composed of small rooms, some to handle expo administration, some were for coat and package checks. However, one of the rooms was the UGWUMP (User Group Welcoming, Unwinding, and Meeting Place) which happened to have a couple of public access Macs connected to the Internet, courtesy of Sirius Corporation.

Letter from the Show Floor

Hi Ron and Roger:

I guess you won't be able to make to the Expo. We had enough for an ASACMUG quorum and held a board meeting at the SF Hilton. Unfortunately, I had to leave early to catch the late train back home. Prior to that, APS threw their party - great folks with great products.

As for Ron's request regarding Etherwave, Farallon seemed more interested in talking about their new ISDN and network modems. Etherwave transceivers are put on the same priority as LocalTalk connectors - just plug and play and minimize extensions to sort out conflicts.

I won copies of PhotoStyler (a.k.a. Photoshop for Performa), Diskfit direct, and yet another copy of Deltagraph. Internet is the big theme of the show, Adobe was crowded, and every other booth had some sort of Internet tie-in. Novell/WordPerfect cancelled at the last minute, and once again, small companies and startups had the coolest software.

The keynotes and expo in general has more people (72,000) but is less festive than last year. The fact that four Apple vice presidents announced their resignation yesterday did not help, nor is the possibility of more layoffs. The keynote by Jim Buckley (Apple USA) is on the internet at Apple's home page.

It took me two days to see all the exhibits. The rest of the time will be spent buying "stuff", mostly books and reference material (I've lagged my programming skills for a whole year) and focusing more on specific vendors.

And that's the latest from the show floor. I'll be seeing you next Tuesday.

Macworld Expo - Reports

Macworld Expo, annual pilgrimage of the Mac faithful, opened in San Francisco to good weather. The lines at the coat checks were short, as rain decided to take a vacation and not bother the thousands of people here to see the latest Mac hardware and software.

Initial estimates put attendance up 15% to 72,000 from the previous year. Post-show figures were later revised upwards to 80,000 for those who did not pre-register.

To test the faith of attendees, and to makeup for the lack of rain, Apple announces bad news in buckets - a $70 million loss for the quarter, margins below 20%, expected resignation of 5 vice presidents, and rumors of a massive layoff of 2,000 to 3,000 Apple employees (who should easily find good jobs elsewhere in Silicon Valley), and an eventual buyout by another company like IBM or Sun Microsystems.

You know what? We've heard this all before, and the press picks it up. The behavior is similar to that of a crowd gathering around a car accident victim. Jim Buckley, one of the few vice presidents who did not get the axe (yet), said as much during his keynote - Apple is here to stay, and with new technologies and alliances to keep it ahead of the Windows crowd. Sales increased by 11% and market share is now in double digits to 11%.

For veteran Expo attendees, the setup is familiar - a large exhibit hall in the south end of Moscone Center and a smaller one in the north side to house smaller companies and the famous Developer Central. Between the two halls is the Apple Pavilion, occupying two large conference halls.

Highlights:

Iomega/SyQuest wars - After the success of Iomega's Zip, the two masters of removable technology offered the next generation in storage. Both Iomega's Jaz and SyQuest's SyJet promise storage capacities in excess of 1 gigabyte. Both drives are based on hard-platter Winchester technology. Drives are expected to sell for $600, with $200 cartridges. The SyJet has 30% more storage at 1.3 gigs. Availability is promised by the middle of this year.

Web processing - Basically, the whole Expo was connected to Internet. The most popular booth was the Apple/Adobe booth exhibiting PageMill and allowing users to create their own Web pages, albeit for only an hour. Other exhibitors with Web processors were drowned in the marketing hype, including two Windows developers - SoftQuad and Vermeer. Bill Gates must have been attending some presentations - Microsoft bought Vermeer's FrontPage soon after the Expo ended.

Internet Service Providers - National internet service providers (ISPs) announced Mac-specific products - Netcom, Earthlink, Pipeline all announced Mac products, albeit a few months or years after the same products were available under Windows. There should be some good competition to the larger online providers. The flat-rate pricing of these smaller ISPs will definitely put pressure on AOL and CompuServe.

Imaging - Adobe previewed new versions of Illustrator and PageMaker. Live Picture, a high-end Photoshop competitor, announced that they are no longer allied with MetaTools and have formed a new company, with a once and future CEO.

Games - MacPlay had a large booth, showing their products. 1995 has been good for Mac gaming - we have all the good games available from the PC and then some (Marathon, Hornet). Also, input devices like game pads and joysticks are becoming popular.

Developer Central - new technologies were demonstrated- OpenDoc, QuickDraw 3D, Copland, Internet/Cyberdog, QuickTime in its various incarnations. Good place to buy books at a 20-30% discount, and the famous BBEdit "It Doesn't Suck" T-shirts. Anyone can spend a couple of hours getting familiar with OpenDoc in three seminar rooms, two by Apple and one by Symantec.

New spreadsheet - Casady & Greene announced a $129 product that is an alternative to Excel. The spreadsheet itself is graphical - instead of just wrapping icons, menus, and toolbars around a grid of cells, C&G's spreadsheet allows you to create blocks of cells, connected by operators and formulas. Although aimed for business users, the product has features for engineering analysis, record keeping, presentations, and other activities. It is expected to be available this March.

Best hardware - the BeBox, which is neither a Mac nor an IBM compatible. Featuring efficient use of dual PowerPC processors, the BeBox has an advanced operating system that puts MacOS to shame the same way the MacOS puts Windows to shame, and very affordable at $1600. Unfortunately, you'd have to wait a while for new software - almost all of their sales are to potential software developers.

Macworld Expo - Ramblings

User group breakfasts - Demos of Adobe PageMill, Newton OS 2.0, Claris FileMaker Pro 3.0, and Adobe PhotoStyler, with lots of free goodies and good news - the User Group Connection is now self-sufficient and profitable. Everyone got free copies of the latter two without documentation. John Sculley, once the unapproachable Apple CEO, was mingling with the crowd. He is head of Live Picture, Inc., but may also be gauging the Mac pulse to see if he can make a corporate comeback, given the bad financial news from Apple. The grand prize was a 4 gigabyte drive donated by APS.

User group room had ISDN terminals, so attendees could check their voice and email during the show. I was able to use a Mac IIci to check my Audix mailbox and leave messages. It seems that even on vacation, everybody does a little work.

ISDN connectivity - during my stay in SF, I visited three apartments, and all had high-speed ISDN lines - talk about being technically hip. ISDN allows one to transmit/receive data four to eight times faster than the fastest 28.8 modems. Imagine being able to download a megabyte of data in two minutes and surf the Web quickly, without modem or firewall bottlenecks. As they say - all good things must come to an end - Pacific Bell found out they were charging too little ($100 setup fee, $70 a month, no usage fees after business hours) and has applied to the CPUC for a rate increase, including per-byte usage charges that should reduce the demand for ISDN. At least they offer ISDN, those of us with the misfortune to be GTE slaves... er... customers, don't even have an ISDN option for under $100 a month with a $200 setup fee.

Novell - also announced a bad financial quarter. In a kneejerk corporate response, their large exhibit booth was suddenly cancelled and Novell employees who had flown in for the show were recalled back to Utah. The only Novell person available was in the Apple Pavilion. He was handing out copies of the latest Netware 4.1 client for the Macintosh.

Macworld Expo - Epilogue

Finally, a few tidbits of information I was unable to categorize:

  • DriveSavers showed a charred PC from which they recovered some data. A Mac attendee observed: "It's a PC, it deserved to die"
  • Bob Levitus, Power Computing evangelist, gave a reason why his company is selling SoftWindows: "SoftWindows is the best way to run crummy software on great hardware"
  • A software engineer from Sun says nice things about my favorite phone company: "GTE - the telephone company from the 19th century trying to lead us into the 21st"
  • Best bag - Iomega had the most visible bag for giving it out on the streets *before* entering the Expo. SyQuest for having the largest bag, and TechWorks for a cardboard box that sold out by the third day.
  • Loudest booth - Power Computing. In search for visibility, Power Computing took over the large booth vacated by Novell and played loud music and videos on a wall composed of sixteen 35" monitors. They offered a good grand prize - $1000 off the Mac-compatibles.
  • Best prize - 1996 Nissan Pathfinder by Digital Video, Inc. The latest Warren Miller ski film is 100% digital, produced on Macintosh computers using Adobe software.
  • Cheapest booth - ClubMac. They basically drove a big rig trailer right into Moscone center, opened the doors, and setup a retail operation. Like those stereo specials in the back of an alley, you can find good deals on Mac stuff - SoftWindows for $199 and an art tablet for $99.
  • Busiest booth - Adobe. In the past two years, Adobe has surpassed Microsoft to become the largest Mac software developer in unit sales. Adobe is committed to a Mac-first policy when it makes sense, and designs their products with the customer in mind. Their products are top-notch and get better with each revision. You can't possibly say that with Microsoft, even if you're a PC user. 1996 should be interesting as Adobe/Netscape takes on Microsoft in the Internet market.
  • Loneliest booth - Microsoft, whose idea of developing for the Mac is using a PC. Give me a break.
  • Best fist fight - someone was taking Marathon way too seriously at the Bungie booth.

Thanks for reading this far. See you at work, and hopefully, at the 1997 San Francisco MacWorld Expo!