Your
preferences,
please: A screen
from the Newsman
publishing system
made by Softmagic
Inc. of Korea shows
the many items
that can be
customized for use
on the Macintosh-based
system.
Apple is about to hit a homer,
and a lot of people will score
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Doing the right thing is what's important.
Even if you do it for the wrong reasons.
Even if you insist.
The folks at Apple Computer are going to have a hit with the iMac. Not the hit they are planning. Not the hit they are expecting.
But, hey! A hit's a hit, right?
Let's review: The iMac, in ways both fortunate and unfortunate, resembles the late, lamented NeXT computer. Both are beyond cool, and look gorgeous just sitting on your desk. Both push the technology envelope.
Both eschew the common technology of the day for the latest and greatest. The original NeXT lacked a floppy drive, offering instead a CD-ROM. The iMac lacks both a floppy drive and a printer port, offering instead Universal Serial Bus ports.
But there's one huge difference between the NeXT and the iMac. The NeXT was positioned as a workstation, with a full setup running $6000 to $10,000. The iMac comes in at the other end of the price spectrum. It is scheduled to launch later this month at $1299 and, if the usual industry pattern holds, that will fall below $1000 before Christmas.
Both the iMac and NeXT come wired for Ethernet hookups. And here's where we get to the part about doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
"Steve [Jobs] designed the iMac for the consumer market as a zero-compromise product," said Bahman Dara, an Apple senior marketing manager. "It's the next generation, not two generations back, like most low-cost computers."
Sounds good. But wait a minute: a consumer product with no floppy drive or printer port, but built-in Ethernet?
"Apple thinks computers will be like televisions," said Dara. "Everyone used to have one television. Now you have one in the living room, one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen. We think the iMac will be like that. You might have it in the kitchen."
That's a lovely vision. But like the NeXT, the iMac may be a little too advanced for average consumers, most of whom need to print and trade files on floppies with office and school equipment and very few of whom are equipped to set up a home Ethernet.
iMac at the iNewspaper
But, hey -- wait a minute! Let's have another look at that puppy: 233-megahertz G3 processor ... built-in 15-inch 1024-by-768 screen ... built-in 10/100BaseT Ethernet .. four-gigabyte hard drive ... 32 megabytes of random access memory ... built-in stereo speakers ... AppleWorks 5 (née ClarisWorks) ... no floppy. ...
Say, this bad boy will make one great network workstation, won't it? For the first time in a long time, you can put together an all-Mac newsroom at the same price point as a PC-based system -- or lower.
And in this type of setup, the iMac's weaknesses become strengths. You don't want floppy drives on newsroom desktops -- they weaken your security and expose you to viruses, unauthorized fonts and a variety of other ills. And you don't care that there isn't a printer port -- you print through the network, so it's a moot point.
The Apple folks aren't exactly going to have a fit if you notice this. "The by-product of the iMac design is that it's a great newsroom machine," said Dara.
The iMac is scheduled to hit store shelves Aug. 15, but chains were reporting heavy advance orders by late July. ZDNet reported that CompUSA is even considering opening at midnight on Aug. 15, as the chain did for the Windows 98 launch.
A minor point: Chances are pretty good that the iMac will be the best-looking piece of equipment in your newsroom. The thing just looks cool, what with its semi-translucent blue case and radical angles.
Remember how cool the first Macs looked, before they started looking like just another PC? Can you really tell a PowerMac tower from a Dell or a Gateway or a Compaq from across the room? Rest assured -- you won't have any trouble picking the iMac out of a crowd. And it's compact, so it will easily fit amid the mountain of rubble on a reporter's desk.
The iMac even comes with a built-in 56-kilobit-per-second modem, so you can drop it in a bureau without further ado -- or cost.
The news has been pretty good for Apple for the last year. The stock price has come roaring out of the basement. The company has posted three profitable quarters in a row, culminating with the July announcement of better-than-forecast profits of $101 million for the third fiscal quarter of 1998.
Unit shipments were down from both the previous quarter and the same quarter the previous year, but some of that may have been from the dampening that inevitably hits sales just before the release of a new product.
It's the Mac operating system
Well, so much for the good news. Let's take a look at what may or may not be the bad news.
Apple has always built cool hardware, but the company's true genius has been in software. Think different: What set the Commodore Amiga and Atari apart from the Macs of their days? What's the difference between a PowerMac and one of IBM's PowerPC-based workstations?
It's not the CPU. It's the MacOS.
Unfortunately for all of us, Apple's operating system road map in the '90s has been crooked enough to run for office in Arkansas. There was Pink, which was going to allow you to run any software. Then there was Taligent, the ill-fated joint project with IBM. Then there was the Newton OS, which took $2 billion and thousands of engineer years away from development of the MacOS.
Then there was Copland, a topic which, frankly, is too painful to discuss.
The latest and greatest "gonna change the world" Apple OS was supposed to be Rhapsody, which was built on the foundation of the fabulous NeXT operating system. Apple seemed to back away from that strategy this spring with the announcement of MacOS X (that x is for 10) and the repositioning of Rhapsody as "a server platform for publishing and Internet solutions," according to an Apple press release titled "Apple announces Mac OS Software Strategy."
One of the best things about the NeXT OS -- and therefore Rhapsody -- was the ease and power it provided developers. Dara said that ease and power -- indeed, the entire so-called Yellow Box -- will be part of MacOS X.
"Rhapsody is the development environment for OS X," said Dara. In addition, MacOS X will include Carbon, a core set of programming interfaces that will allow developers to build applications that can run on both Mac OS X and Mac OS 8.
"Carbon is a set of 6000 APIs (application programming interfaces) for OS X," said Dara.
That may be so. But the really cool thing is the Apple folks go around referring to software that has been "Carbonized." Sounds like the plot from a lost Star Trek episode, doesn't it?
Korean magic
But seriously, folks, it's hard to overestimate the importance of an easy development platform for the continued success of Apple. The drop in the Mac's market share over the last few years has hurt it with independent software developers, and their efforts -- their software -- are crucial to any system's success.
So how powerful is the Yellow Box development environment? For a testimonial, look no further than Lewis JungYub Oh, director of technical sales for Softmagic Inc., which Oh describes as a leading producer of publishing systems for the Korean market. The company was founded in New York in 1987, then moved to Seoul.
Since its inception, Softmagic has played a key role in transforming the Korean publishing industry, Oh said. A large part of that comes from Softmagic's double-byte PostScript typefaces for the Korean language, which has its own alphabet.
Softmagic also offers the Newsman publishing system, which has installations in Korea ranging from 12 seats to 600 seats. The larger papers put out newspapers that average 32 pages a day for each of five editions. Newsman is currently in use at four Korean daily newspapers -- Taegu Ilbo, Cheju Ilbo, Korea Herald and Seoul Shinmun -- and one weekly newspaper, Hwakwang Newspaper.
So we're talking about a fairly high-end system. But Newsman is even more complex than you'd think. Because it was designed for Asian newspapers, Newsman can handle vertical typesetting, a significant requirement for Chinese-language environments, as fluently as horizontal layout.
The system is built from a series of 12 interoperable modules. It was originally developed on NextStep, and is now fully compatible with Rhapsody and MacOS X, said Oh. How long did it take to develop such a complex system? Hundreds of engineer years? Thousands?
"It took two guys two years," said Oh.
Even better, the fact that the system was developed in NextStep's strong object-oriented programming model means it is easy to upgrade and maintain the system.
"Newsman was developed using the latest object-oriented technology (NextStep/OpenStep) and therefore can be customized in short order," said a Softmagic press release. "For example, the workflow management function and the new user interface were recently integrated to the package as requested by our clients."
Newsman's roots in NextStep/Yellow Box mean that it is based on industry standards, said Oh, including PostScript for both screen display and print. The system works seamlessly with industry-standard relational database management systems, including Oracle, Sybase, Informix and OpenBase. Networking is based on TCP/IP and NFS.
The system can be deployed across a wide range of workstation-class hardware, including Intel and PowerPC, and operating systems, including Windows NT/95, Rhapsody for Intel and Rhapsody for PowerPC/Mac OS.
And Newsman is already ready for MacOS X, said Oh.
"There's no need to migrate. It's already Yellow Box compliant," said Oh.
So, sounds cool, doesn't it? But how did this exploration of the Newsman newsroom system break out in the middle of a discussion of Apple's health?
Simple: If Apple is going to thrive, not just survive, it needs to have clear advantages to offer. One of these must be a strong software development community.
Remember, the techno crypt is littered with the bones of superior technology that died for lack of software. IBM's OS/2, for example, made Windows 3.X look like a cruel joke -- pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory and a better, faster Windows subsystem than Windows. But native OS/2 software was as rare as a Washington afternoon without a sordid revelation, and the OS went the way of all flesh.
NextStep was such a strong development tool that it survived as a development platform even after the NeXT computer system died off.
Comes now Yellow Box. Now NextStep's development chops are married to an OS with a significant market share. Now it becomes more attractive and easier for developers to roll out Mac products, and to keep them updated.
That's good news for Apple.
Even better, for the first time this decade Apple seems to have a coherent OS strategy. That's good for developers, who are naturally leery of developing for your current OS if you've announced you're abandoning it.
And that is good for consumers, who naturally want to be able to do the maximum possible amount of work and play with their chosen machine. No one wants to hear, "Sorry! We don't make that for your computer."
All of that adds up to good news for the denizens of One Infinite Loop. More developers. More software. More customers.
More momentum -- in the right direction.
Say what you want about Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field. For the first time this decade, Apple is moving in the right direction.
-- Christopher J. Feola
Apple Computer Inc.,
(408) 974-4611.
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