Microsoft, using its BackOffice technology, assisted Nasdaq in developing a web site (http://www.nasdaq.com/) that came on-line seven weeks after the idea was proposed.

"The day it was put into production for the public, it had a hot link to every company listed on the exchange," McDowell said.

After three days of training, clerks at the banks were able to perform "twice the number of transactions than the previous system and they were more accurate," said McDowell.

A buyer could configure a car with various options and then bid a price on the web site; the dealership then countered. When they agreed, the car could be delivered anywhere -- including the buyer's driveway.

"Someday, sitting in your den, you'll issue an RFP [request for proposal]," said McDowell. "'I have money and a driveway and I'd like to have something in that driveway. Anybody have something to put there?'"

Time spent on the average sale was reduced from five hours to less than one hour, he said.

Toward the end of his presentation, McDowell did mention newspapers, but only briefly.

"The fact is, the money I pay for the newspaper contributes very little to the overall profitability of the company. If the eyeballs move, the profits move with them.

"Will one impact the other? I think so."

The view from Cupertino
Next to speak was Chris Gulker, an erstwhile colleague at the San Francisco Examiner who is now Apple's business development manager for publishing and media markets. (Conflict-of-interest alert: Gulker has retained The Cole Group on a couple of occasions to assist Apple in understanding the newspaper marketplace.)

Gulker was supposed to concentrate on the "hot new technology" of Apple's OpenDoc (see The intersection between Apple and newspaper business), but his background as a newspaper photographer and editor led him to begin by taking direct aim at his former industry.

"The entire newspaper industry's software and hardware purchases in 1997 will amount to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Apple's North American market," Gulker said. "The newspaper market is composed of cost-conscious early adopters and pioneers who helped companies like Adobe, Quark and Apple position their products as the de facto standard of print publishing. The market was worth supporting because of its leverage."

Today, Gulker said, Apple, Adobe and Quark are less interested in newspapers because the standards have been set, there has been only "modest" growth in print, and newspapers' movement into new media has been "reluctant."

More importantly, Gulker said, the support of these suppliers is becoming less important.

"Newspapers that are willing to take responsibility for their own systems can tap a vast resource in component software," he said. "Technologies like Java, OpenDoc and intranets offer the promise of low-cost, low-risk, high-performance, do-it-yourself systems."

Gulker wasn't sanguine about the possibilities of "the promise" of these new component technologies in newspapers, though. "Newspaper careers are sometimes measured by the lack of mistakes you make," he said.

Nonetheless, Gulker said that component technologies -- whether they are OpenDoc, Java or Microsoft's ActiveX -- will lead the way to the future for niche markets (like newspapers) because developers of these components "don't have to put in features for all markets."

Addressing an issue near and dear to Mac bigots everywhere, Gulker said Apple's new operating system -- Rhapsody -- will incorporate features from the NextStep operating system as well as features from Apple's Copland (System 8) development.

"System 7 is not dead," he said, "and will be developed into the foreseeable future."

One aspect of Rhapsody that Gulker felt would benefit publishers is the working assumption that it will use Display PostScript -- Adobe technology that draws images on a computer monitor -- rather than Apple's traditional QuickDraw.

Predicting that PostScript printer errors will become a thing of the past, Gulker said, "what you see is really what you will get."

The view from vendorville
A round table discussion among suppliers to the newspaper industry highlighted Tuesday morning.

Eric Wolferman, NAA's senior vice president for technology, moderated a panel featuring Claus Erik Cristofferson, president and chief executive of Euromax of Herlev, Denmark; Mike Gold, president of CNI Corp. of Lyndeboro, N.H.; Bernhard Schreier, chairman of Linotype-Hell of Eschborn, Germany, and Frank Washington, chief executive officer of System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, Calif.

Calling the supplier industry "arrogant in the '80s," Schreier was quick to point out that his own business was fragile. "If you look at Heidelberg and the acquisition of Linotype-Hell, Heidelberg stopped a bankruptcy that would have happened in the near future."

Washington, who took over SII just six months ago, said it appeared to him that there had been an assumption at SII that it "could be all things to all people." The company was "pursuing redundant lines of development," he said, even where "others had perfected products way beyond what we could do."

Washington asked, "Why should we continue to support -- at high cost -- endeavors that we could achieve much better and much quicker through third parties?"

Gold, whose company provides integration services exclusively, called himself his fellow panelists' "worst nightmare." Rather than complaining about how difficult business was for him, Gold said 1996 was "our best year."

Sizing up his customers, Euromax's Cristofferson said a basic problem with the industry is that publishers don't think enough about technology. Publishers, he said, should ask themselves "'are we an IT [information technology] company or are we running a newspaper?' It's a decision that should be taken by management rather than by the individual employee."

Sounding a note oft aired by suppliers, he said simply, "To make good products, it takes good customers."

Schreier found fault with the U.S. business mindset, complaining that "the American business mentality doesn't allow for dealing with a mature business," such as newspapers.

Gold chimed in, describing the U.S. publishing industry as a "Wild West show," suggesting that most people had an "antiorganizational" attitude which has led newspapers to buy technology in an incremental way.

Near the end of the session, Cristofferson looked ahead, saying, "The future is going to give us a lot of changes, and we'll need systems that can be changed fast."

-- dmc

Apple
Computer Inc.,
(408) 996-1010;
CNI Corp.,
(617) 244-5546;
Euromax,
(606) 441-1940,
e-mail: wwwemx.@dde.dde.dk;
Linotype-Hell Co.,
(516) 434-2029,
e-mail: ken_pond@linotype.com;
Microsoft Corp.,
(206) 882-8080;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com.

See also Computer-to-plate-to-newspaper-press

From THE COLE PAPERS, February 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.