Home office gambles

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1998 by Heather Newman

Schwartz's husband Jeff considered all of these factors and decided to take the plunge. He runs a number of businesses from their home in Bethesda, Md., including Euro Fine Art, an imported art print company. "We have a printed catalog, and it seemed like the next thing to do," he says. "We already had digitized photos for the catalog. I'm really excited about it. I can introduce a new image on the Internet and not have to print it in the catalog. I think it's going to work."

Bottom Line: Long odds, but big payoffs for a few.

RELATED ARTICLE: Five gambles that paid off ...

1. The Internet Nobody took much notice when four university servers joined forces to form the original Internet back in 1969. But when the first enterprising companies started using this channel as a means to conduct business, the skeptics howled. Three hundred and twenty million Web pages later, the howling has quieted considerably.

2. Cell phones The first cellular phones were popular with corporate peacocks anxious to clutch the latest high-tech status symbol. Costs ran high and coverage wasn't very good, but hey, why let practical concerns get in the way of some friendly intimidation? Today, anybody can afford a wireless phone--even the peacocks' telecommuting employees--and millions put them to use every day.

3. Windows 3.1 Windows 3.0 didn't exactly set the operating system world on fire, and naysayers were more than a little reluctant to adopt this technology. As it turned out, Windows 3.1 was a sturdy product--and helped transform Bill Gates from a run-of-the-mill computer geek into king of the world.

4. Zip drives Investing in a 100MB storage device to replace the floppy was an act of blind faith for early Iomega Zip adopters. But it turned out to be quite a shrewd move, as there are currently some 15 million Zip drives in use. Ubiquity is key in the data storage and transfer market, and Zip, like Visa, is just about everywhere you want to be.

5. America Online AOL flew in the face of convention when it built a proprietary online service that wasn't compatible with the POP3 e-mail standard and charged users a premium for editorial content. Surely it would crash and burn, right? Sure. AOL put a friendly face on the World Wide Web and crushed its competitors with a simple interface.

... and five that didn't

1. IBM's OS/2 Big Blue had big plans for this technically superb operating system, but the mass market wanted nothing to do with it. OS/2 still lives, though almost exclusively for the narrow enterprise market. Ralph Nader has called on IBM to relaunch OS/2 as a populist/underdog alternative to Windows, but that role has already been taken by the freeware OS Linux.

2. Apple's Newton The handheld computer market is finally taking off, but don't expect Apple's ill-fated Newton to join in the celebration. In fact, perennial interim CEO Steve Jobs discontinued the Newton line in March, formally signing the death certificate of a device that was about a decade ahead of its time.

3. Pay-to-view Web sites Surfers have shown time and again that they're not willing to pay just to see a Web site Aside from The Wall Street Journal Interactive (www.wsl.com), which has 200,000 subscribers, pay-to-view sites have struggled mightily. Slate magazine (www.slate.com) drew some 270,000 visitors per month earlier this year; since implementing a $19.95 annual fee, 20,000 have signed up.