Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!rutgers!cmcl2!esquire!sbb
From: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: The Death of Apple Computer
Keywords: Apple, Mac, Prices, Rip-off
Message-ID: <645@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 19 Sep 88 18:49:34 GMT
References: <1356@sunny3.che.clarkson.edu> <78@bridge2.3Com.Com> <1361@sunny1.che.clarkson.edu>
Reply-To: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Distribution: na
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 66

In article <1361@sunny1.che.clarkson.edu> kweeder@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Jim Kweeder) writes:
>As for training, I instruct neophytes all the time in DOS and UNIX and
>occasionally for the Macintosh.  I can safely say it doesn't take more
>or less time for any of these systems. 
>[ ... ]
>I'm not saying a Mac II should cost $2,000 complete, but we're over
>10 grand now.  Except for desk-top-publishing, the Macintosh is a
>performance/dollar looser (your not going to sell me on it costs less
>to train Mac:  do you really think it'll take less time to learn Word
>on the Mac than the AT?).  Next year, Apple's position in the DTP
>business may not be nearly so good.

Unless you're instructing them in FrameMaker on a Sun (which I don't
think is the easiest program to use myself), nothing under Unix and
very little under DOS is as easy to use as the programs on a Mac.  Are
you seriously comparing troff or TeX to PageMaker?

Maybe some of the new Windows programs under DOS are usable, but for
documents that require multiple fonts/graphics, nothing comes close to
the Mac yet.  Even Word on the Mac, which many people feel is too
DOS-like, is easier to learn than Word on the PC.  So yes, I *am*
saying that it takes less time to learn Word on the Mac than on the
PC.  Within 15 minutes Mac Word users can create fairly complex
documents with different fonts and graphics, and can easily create
headers, footers, and footnotes.  I don't think there's anyone on the
face of the earth who can pick up PC Word in that amount of time.  It
takes that long just to explain to people what the difference between
"Transfer-Spell-Hyphenate" and "Galley-Format-Style-Paragraph-Change"
is and what page to look it up on in the manual when you forget again
tomorrow.

Also, the "10 grand" figure is somewhat misleading.  We're in the
process of buying a Mac, and we'll be spending about that amount of
money, but for it we're getting a Mac II, 80 meg disk, 2 megs memory,
Radius 2 Page Display, Apple scanner, tape backup, Excel, Word,
PowerPoint, MacDraw, Illustrator, lots of other odds and ends.  I'm
sure I've forgotten some.

On the PC, Word, and I guess Excel are available.

Apple's position in the serious DTP market is as solid as it can get.
It has competition from PageMaker on the PC (and Ventura to some
extent).  But to our company (and many others), the saving 2 or 3
thousand dollars does not justify moving to a system where
data-interchange is next to impossible, expandability is limited (i.e.,
adding new monitors, moving to new software as we outgrow what we
currently have without massive retraining costs), and many essential
tools are simply unavailable (Illustrator, Freehand, object-oriented
draw programs, presentation graphics packages, to name a few).

To me, this is the same as hearing from a programmer that it's just as
nice to develop under DOS as under Unix.  While there are compilers and
linkers in both environments, if you want or need to work in a
development environment of any sophistication, there really is no
comparison.

Sorry for the length and possible irrelevance of this posting (it
really had nothing to do with DRAM shortages or Apple's strategic
planning).  It just irritates me when people blithely assume that money
is the only (or even the predominant) deciding factor in the purchase
of a computer system.

-- 
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   {uunet,cmcl2}!esquire!sbb    | 
   sbb%esquire@cmcl2.nyu.edu    |                           - David Letterman