We've been going 'round and 'round on this for a couple of years now: Like cats and dogs (and men and women), suppliers and publishers just don't understand one another.
And whether suppliers are from Mars and buyers are from Venus (or vice versa), I have been somewhat in the middle of this interplanetary discourse.
Recently, I had the opportunity to get a longish e-mail from Mike Tucker, who is a product manager at Gannett Media Technologies International Inc. of Cincinnati. In it, Tucker made these points about suppliers and publishers:
Even as an industry, newspapering is too small to justify much effort by suppliers -- be they traditional or nontraditional.
I thought these points needed to be illuminated, so I commissioned Tucker to write a personal opinion piece. This was unusual, as we choose not to have supplier representatives write for The Cole Papers -- with the exception once of an engineer explaining his company’s Internet implementation.
But I believed that Tucker’s points needed to be made and I was, frankly, tired of making them myself. (Tucker was compensated the same way any contributor to The Cole Papers would be, and though we permitted his superiors at Gmti a look at this piece, they suggested changing only a few insubstantial words.)
Inside, you'll find Tucker’s thoughts on the state of the supplier industry and the state of the publishing industry. We invite dialog not only with Tucker, but with us as well.
Also inside, Correspondent Marion J. Love finds that many suppliers are providing much valuable information on their World-Wide Web sites. Products are demonstrated on web sites, some sites distribute demonstration copies of products, and some companies are providing overviews and samples on their web pages.
This trend is useful to publishers, because it means that a lot of product research can be done from the comfort of one’s desk.
In another story inside, we have what will be the first in a series of articles dealing with the Year 2000 -- a computing problem whose ugly head will rear ever higher in coming months.
In the dawn of computing (remember the ’60s?), carrying a full date (like 1966) required four bytes. This was in an era when entire operating systems functioned in fewer than 16 kilobytes, so programmers decided that the first two digits were superfluous.
This has been fine until now, but in a mere three years, systems that carry only the last two digits will think the date is 1900, not 2000.
Correspondent Christopher J. Feola takes us to the company that supports Digital Equipment Corp.’s ancient Text Management System (you might know it better as TMS) and Classified Management System -- as well as the support organization for the old Hastech systems -- to see how they are going to respond to the Year 2000 problem.
We also are providing a few product reviews from America West that were forced out of last issue because the editor and publisher has this inability to do simple arithmetic.
And, lastly, the Hellbox is full this month, with the latest on Sysdeco Media Group’s transformation into Atex, details of a change of ownership at Galacticomm Inc. and a bit bucket brimming with new titles, job shifts and conferences galore (along with a handy guide to 1997’s key meetings).
We hope that in 1997, you will resolve to learn more about the industry, the Year 2000 problem and the World-Wide Web. In turn, let’s hope the suppliers resolve to learn more about us.
-- David M. Cole
From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.
