Letters - Letter to the Editor

Software Magazine, May, 1997

Fighting Back

To Josh Greenbaum: I read your article in the March issue ("Apple: Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be," pg. 14). You are doing your job. You are doing it well.

But your words feel like fists in my face. Oh, you're not alone. I'm an idiot. I deserve to be beaten down by all you guys. This will help you realize how effective your excellent writing is: I feel terrible. I thought I had much to offer my company. But I must be an alien creature, something to abhor, to point and laugh at, for I still prefer the Macintosh computer to anything else I have used.

I'm sure the people who have had corporate responsibility for Apple have done a deplorable job. I'm sure most companies feel monumentally secure in their resolve to keep Macintoshes away from their employees.

I agree with most of what you said in the parts I understood. However, there was one comment that puzzled me. It was this: "There are some very simple points of incompatibility: Ever try to read an attached file on a Mac that was sent from a Windows machine? Sorry, wrong format."

I can't remember a time when I couldn't read just about anything from a Windows machine or any kind of computer, given the right, simple tools.

You hit the proverbial nail on the head when you said, "How about the MacOS? It's a nice operating system that definitely has a better interface than Windows. But it's becoming more and more of a liability in companies that have embraced the market leader."

I guess I don't really understand what you mean by "liability" here. The Macintosh doesn't swing an ax at unsuspecting Windows afficionados who happen to walk by. (I don't think it has become that Mac-user-friendly yet.)

What saddens me is that corporations -- people really -- embrace the market leader rather than the product or service that is truly better. While I will go along with the wishes of my employer, I eagerly await the arrival of my new Macintosh Powerbook 3400/200, for which I am paying over $5000 out of my own pocket. Thanks for your ear.

Alice Dixon ajdixon@primenet.com

An OS of a Different Color

In the "Inside Apps" column in the March edition of Software Magazine (pg. 14), Josh Greenbaum wrote a greatly misinformed article about Apple Macintosh. I feel such gross inaccuracy is beneath the standards of your magazine, or any publication with objective journalistic standards.

Some of the most glaring horse hockey includes:

* Macs can't read files sent to them by Wintel machines. I have been reading Wintel files on Macs for many years, and it has always been simpler than sharing from Wintel to Wintel. As a matter of fact, I have worked in several offices with mixed platforms, and many times people came to the Macs to open files made on other "Wintel-compatible" machines. (The Mac reads them, the Wintel did not.)

* NextStep was licensed and buried by IBM. Many reputable magazines now employ fact checkers. This might be a good idea for Software Magazine since apparently the policy is to hire authors who don't.

* A couple of references to nostalgia. I know many Mac users and they are the most forward-thinking, futuristic people I know. When we want to get nostalgic, we use Windows 95. When we lose the capacity to think and talk for ourselves, we'll let you know.

* Only people in publishing, design or a similar niche care about Apple's purchase of Next. Please remember this statement when you soon cough up Intel news releases about what Mac business users have known for years: Powerful publishing and design CPUs (yes, I'm talking about MMX) make even more powerful business machines.

* For the real serious business of business, IS management wants the comfort that comes from tried and true methods. I know many people in business who use Wintel and would tell you it's tried but anything but true. Perhaps "trying" is the better word. Check out these facts: The Power Macintosh line is widely acknowledged as the leading platform for Web authoring and CD-ROM content creation. A study by Gistics Inc., Larkspur, Calif., found that professionals who create digital media realize higher profitability, higher productivity and faster product cycles when using a Macintosh computer. The study shows that these professionals enjoy profits 32% higher than the industry average, 73% higher than those using SGI systems and 108% higher than those using Windows-based systems.

So my simple request is: If you're going to write about something, please get a columnist who has actual "working" knowledge of that subject. This is Journalism 101, folks.

Dennis Burnside DMBurnside@aol.com

Greenbaum's reply: I'm sorry that Mr. Burnside took such strong exception to my column, but "horse hockey" it ain't. Sending files from Wintel machines to Macintosh PCs is simply not simple: My Internet mail box is full of files from Mac users that have character-translation problems, and my Mac (yes, I have a Powerbook at home) has a similar problem fetching ASCII files off the Internet. IBM's original agreement to license NextStep yielded neither significant sales nor market share for the interface. That's a fact. As for the business aspects of the Macintosh, I guess we just disagree about whether design, web authoring, CD-ROM development, and the like represent mainstream IS business uses or niche markets. There is no doubt that many viable businesses fit into this niche, but as a percent of the overall IS market, I still maintain that "digital media" is small potatoes.