What is the press up to? Find out every month here in Bits & Pieces!
IT’S NOTHING, REALLY
O.K., so how many of you noticed the new addition to the cast of Seinfeld during this, the show’s last season? I’m speaking, of course, of his new Mac. Always a fixture, but never a player in the plot, Jerry’s Mac (one of the elderly LC types, if I’m not mistaken) sat comfortably within view by the window (behind the table behind the couch). Then, several weeks ago, I noticed a brand new Mac in its place. Comically, for a character never seen actually using his computer, Seinfeld’s Mac is one of the top-of-the-line $7,000 upright, thin-screen 20th Anniversary edition Macintoshes, much like the one used by Batgirl in last year’s Batman and Robin.
AWARDS FROM THE CULTURAL ELITE Continue reading »
As a working member of the advertising community, it’s tempting to frown upon attempts by a mass-market consumer magazine produced for mere commoners to seat itself in judgment of our industry’s creativity. Then again, TIME magazine picked some pretty cool ads to honor in its year-end issue. Among them (ranked #6) were Apple’s “Think Different” ads which were produced and unleashed this year with the approval of Once and Again Grand Poohba of Apple, Steve Jobs. Admittedly, it was sometimes hard to guess the name and occupation of the featured personality (is that Amelia Earhart? or Zelda Fitzgerald?), and the campaign reminds some people a little too much of those fun Gap Khakis ads from a few years back (remember “Marilyn wore khakis”?), but who couldn’t smile upon seeing an entire city bus wrapped in an image of Albert Einstein?
What is the press up to? Find out every month here in Bits & Pieces!
CAMPUS MAC Continue reading »
One of my own rules for this column is to not use Mac publications as sources for my material since the My Mac audience already reads them. However, I recently thought I had the perfect opportunity to be humble and show off my fallibility when I saw a MacWeek article with the headline “Campuses stay loyal to Mac platform” in the November 3 issue. In our October issue of My Mac, I pointed out that many Ivy League schools are feeling forced to warn their students away from the Macintosh platform as their campus intranets get cozy with Wintel. The MacWeek article, I was sure, would prove that those crazy East Coast schools were jumping the gun. Turns out, this is probably exactly what the editors wanted me to think, and they were probably hoping that I would just continue flipping the pages without reading the article. Because the only specific reference I could find in the article to academic institutions’ loyalty to the Mac was: “At most sites, plans that extend the Mac’s reach into campus life are winning out.” Not exactly overwhelming support for the article’s headline. The rest of the article really had more to do with the development of campus intranets.
What is the press up to? Find out every month here in Bits & Pieces!
WIRED WANTS WOMEN Continue reading »
Never a magazine to sit idly by while its social agenda fails to be properly imposed, Wired Magazine felt it necessary to point out with some disdain that with the recent resignations of Heidi Roizen and Ellen Hancock, there are no longer any senior female executives at Apple. (After all, just because many members of the board have been replaced, no one has technically been in charge for months, and the list of resignations and firings uses more ink than my StyleWriter cartridge, there’s no reason why delicately balancing the occupation of top positions by gender shouldn’t have been the top priority for the struggling company. Now that a CEO has finally been found, I’m sure all of the positions vacated in recent months can now be filled in the most politically correct manner.)
What is the press up to? Find out every month here in Bits & Pieces!
THE LITTLE GUYS Continue reading »
On September 6, the New York Times had a very interesting article detailing some of the current waves being made by previously deposed Apple co-founder and current acting CEO Steve Jobs. (Let’s see him put that on a business card.) First, as his recent repeated run-in’s with the clone-makers should have prepared us, Jobs has killed the idea of letting another piece of Apple’s business, in this case Newton, get spun off from the parent company. A decade ago, it was an internal battle between Jobs and then-CEO-to-be John Sculley over the Newton (and the entire concept of hand-held computing) that eventually led to Jobs leaving the company. He didn’t believe in Sculley’s vision and thought the Newton was the wrong path to follow. Sculley took over the company, followed the path, and Apple has been trying to make Newton viable ever since. But now that Jobs is back and calling the shots, he’s keeping Newton in-house amid speculation that it will undergo a corporate cross-breeding with Apple’s eMate education computers.
What is the press up to? Find out every month here in Bits & Pieces!
YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT THE DEAL. WHAT ABOUT THE COVERAGE?
TIME Magazine was all over the story of the Apple/Microsoft alliance in its August 18th issue. This was not because of TIME’s vision of Apple’s importance in American life. It wasn’t even because of the important support that Macs enjoy within the publishing community. It had a lot more to do with some promising behind-the-scenes negotiating done by Mr. Jobs. Behind-the-scenes is a relative term here, of course, because the Jobs/TIME deal was right on the cover of TIME, neatly wrapped up in the word “Exclusive.”
We all know Apple has taken a beating in the press for the last several years. The market share has dwindled, the stock has dropped, and the marketing agency has been fired. What Apple needs more than anything is good press, wide exposure, and a vision of a rosy future. What better way to serve this purpose than an artfully composed black and white photo of Apple’s new leader on the cover of America’s most well known magazine adorned with the words “The World’s a Better Place”? Advertising can’t buy that.
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What is the PC press up to? Find out every month here in Bits & Pieces!
Y2K Continue reading »
Many of you probably saw the June 2 cover story of Newsweek detailing the nightmare of preventing the coming Year 2000 computer crisis (also known as the Millennium Bug). You’d have to read pretty carefully, however, to see any mention of Macintosh systems in the article. The collected stories and sidebars detailing the software bug in the country’s technological infrastructure that render current computer systems unable to discriminate between the years 1900 and 2000 did feature two photos of Macs, but only one sentence addressed Apples directly. In a sidebar explaining that most home PCs won’t be effected (internally) by the turn of the century, a brief statement was made that current Macs recognize dates up to 2040. (A note, however: your Mac system will be fine, but some really old software applications may need to be updated. If you’re concerned, you still have a couple years to contact the software manufacturer.)
FIRST
In the years since the World Wide Web went mainstream, I’ve read about many people who have been credited with creating the new medium. TIME Magazine (May 19) most recently credited Tim Berners-Lee with being the man behind it all. “Berners-Lee developed the three technical keystones of the Web: the language for encoding documents (HTML, hypertext markup language); the system for linking documents (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol); and the www.whatever system for addressing documents (URL, universal resource locator).” The fascinating new piece of the story for me, however, was that Berners-Lee did it all on a NeXT computer. “Sitting on Berners-Lee’s desk, it would become the first Web content ‘server,’ the first node in this global brain.” With a history like that, coupled with the tremendous influence of Macintosh on the way everyone (including Windows users) uses computers, it’s not hard to imagine the NeXT/Mac alliance leading to something big.
Y2K/Mac
This piece isn’t exactly about the Year 2000 Crisis for the world’s computers, but it’s a date problem that caught my eye. The reason it caught my eye is the year 1904. For as long as I’ve owned Mac’s, they’ve seemed fond of occasionally pretending certain files were created way back in the middle of the (Theodore) Roosevelt Administration. I don’t know why. Norton Utilities didn’t care, it just fixed the problem file by file. Now comes word (reported in the May 12 issue of Information Week) that the year 1904 is becoming an obvious sign of an unwelcome bug in the system clock of PowerBook 3400′s. Apparently, “resetting the machine’s battery-power gauge also mysteriously resets the system’s clock back to 1904.” This problem is compounded by users of the Claris Organizer software that comes with the 3400′s; Organizer diligently sets about reorganizing your schedules to match the new date.
ORACLE SPEAKS TO APPLE’S FUTURE
Computerworld was allowing itself the freedom of public punditory discord in April. A page 2 letter from the editor read “Go for it, Larry.” The reference is to Larry Ellison, President and CEO of Oracle. Larry recently launched a trail balloon into the swirling crosswinds of Wall Street traders and the Silicon Valley press concerning a recurring dream he has of taking over Apple and saving the company from its frightful management nightmare. Computerworld’s editor thinks the situation is desperate enough, and Apple technology good enough, to merit a dramatic takeover of the company. To Ellison, editor Paul Gillin says, “You and your friend Steve Jobs are dripping with vision … You’ll be a hero.”
The commentary on page 123, however, is a little bit different: “How about if I comment on Ellison’s plan to drive Apple into the ground.” One theory on this page is that pals Ellison and Jobs are always trying to one-up each other in all manner of things … and a hostile takeover of Apple is just another power wedgie, Jobs would have to call his buddy Boss. The commentary goes on to accuse Ellison of just wanting attention. “If Ellison really wants Apple, he just has to sit down and cut the check …. But corporate raiding — well, that gets a guy noticed.”
THE GUERRILLA WAR Continue reading »
James Coates wasn’t the only victim of the over-zealous Mac faithful during the Apple/NeXT marriage (see last month’s column). PC Week (Jan. 20) ran an article on some recent attacks on computer writers and IT managers lead by Guy Kawasaki. (A picture accompanying the article showed Kawasaki done up in an interesting interpretation of the Mac OS logo as war paint.) The author of the EvangeList had a few other people on his hit list, earning them the cyber equivalent of a cherry bomb in their mailbox. Generally the attacks consist of an uncontrolled flood of vicious e-mail. There are other methods, however. A Newsweek writer (Barb Kantrowitz) was subscribed to “a sex-related discussion group.” She also received an e-mail which made particularly good use of turn-of-the-century ideology by asking: “Why don’t you go and bake brownies and leave this to the boys?” On the PC side of the computing world, Kawasaki is definitely redefining what it means to be a Mac lover. After all, if you can’t persuade people of your point of view through intelligent debate and hard work, leading the troops to sexist name-calling and pedantic cyber tricks is bound to win the war!
HEADLINES
I should have seen it coming, of course. Most months, I pretty much comment on every article I see on Apple and Apple products. But with the high stakes last-gasp lunge at survival that Apple enacted by buying out NeXT, the entire computer publishing world double-clicked its collective word processor icons to write, editorialize, praise, and criticize the latest move by Gil Amelio and his corporate crew. If I cut out all the headlines from all the columns and articles I saw on the subject this month and threw them in the air, the mess would rival New York after their parade last year for the Yankees. So, first, a sampling of the headlines:
Jan. 13.)
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WHO KNEW? Continue reading »
What a nightmare! Actual, true-life research was required for me to write this month’s column! But these things happen with late breaking news. Of course, late-breaking is a relative term when you write for a monthly e-zine. One of the dangers of writing a monthly column concerning a fast-developing industry like the computer industry is that the words you write can become outdated before anyone but your editor reads them. Which is, of course, just what happened to me this month. I had been proud of myself for once again sending off my column to Tim, our publisher, within a day or so of the actual deadline (rumor has it I am often the last of the My Mac staff to submit my work). And then AOL’s News Profile system quietly slipped the news into my e-mail box: Apple Computer had pushed Be Inc. out of the spotlight and bought up NeXT, the computer software company established by the Apple’s founding father, Steve Jobs. I had my suspicions as I scrolled through the first few articles that perhaps this would call for a small addendum to my column. A correction. A tweak here or there. But in the back of my brain, an idea was fighting for attention. It was the idea that I needed to do some actual research to leave my column some integrity. Yes, I would have to pursue the story, not simply let it be delivered to me with the rest of my office mail. As past readers of my column know, I make a column every month by splicing together comments and editorial that the PC press has made about Macintosh and Apple and then throwing in my own humble critiques on those articles. For deadline purposes, however, I took to the Web to rewrite my column this month. Visiting the Websites of some of the major PC publications, this is what I found….
THE BE BUZZ THAT WAS
All the hollering over the Apple/NeXT deal can’t get rid of some previous developments on the Be front. The attention Be was getting from the world as a result of the attention it was getting from Apple led to some interesting developments. Some of the recent reporting on Be: (from Information Week, Dec. 2):
NeXT cost Apple $400 million. One of Be’s main problems was that it had slapped a price tag of $500 million on itself. Apple reportedly wanted a sale price of $100 million. In Infoworld’s December 2nd issue, gossip columnist Robert X. Cringely declared that the $100 million offer was plenty for Be to buzz about. Of course, as pointed out by the November 18th issue of Inter@ctive Week, outright sale of Be to Apple was never the only possibility; licensing the BeOS was also an option for Apple.
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THE BE BUZZ
While the whole computer magazine industry was reporting on the ‘rumors’ about Apple’s negotiations to take over Be’s operating system as a replacement for Copland and the savior of the Mac, there wasn’t as much coverage as you might expect. That’s because, at this point, most magazines still have to call this whole story a rumor. Apple and Be refuse to acknowledge that any talks are going on at all, despite several of the magazines emphatically quoting sources inside the negotiations, reporting on locations of meetings, and detailing various methods of the Be OS/MacOS integration. And, surprisingly, there has been less editorializing than I’d expect, although most of the opinions expressed by typing heads of the industry seem favorable.
Computerworld (November 11) was one of the publications to smack the story on its front page, stating simply that Apple is “hashing out a deal” with Be. Some of the specific issues Computerworld touched on: Continue reading »
• Compatibility with current software: “Several users interviewed last week shrugged off the trade-off, and developers were enthusiastic.” Enthusiastic about the lack of compatibility? Yes, apparently … Computerworld explains that many developers think it will be a short-lived problem, circumvented by “emulation or by using the coming (CHRP) systems due out early next year.”
• The release date: “If everything goes according to the tentative schedule, users would get the hybrid system in the middle of next year.”
A HILL OF BEANS IN A BARREL OF APPLES
That’s how you should remember the strategy. That is, the strategy behind the new alliance between Apple/IBM/OpenDoc and Sun Microsystems/Java Beans. Of course, almost all of the industry press covered this event. It was important for a couple of reasons. One is that just last July, many software developers were questioning the level of commitment Apple and IBM were giving to OpenDoc. This new alliance with Sun makes their commitment much more obvious: they’re serious. Another reason is that the alliance is an intriguing shift in strategy for Apple and IBM. As explained in the Sept. 23 issue of Infoworld, because of it, the two companies are now actually steering the developers of applets away from OpenDoc and towards Java Beans, but then encouraging the use of OpenDoc as a container application. That being said, I should humbly point out that I don’t really get the rest of the technical stuff . But I can say that, as we all know, the big question is if this new alliance can compete with Microsoft’s Active X. Maybe. But people aren’t betting the farm on it. It bodes well, though, that while users have been investing a lot of time and money into Active X, and almost none at all in OpenDoc, Java Beans has already attracted a lot of attention.
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EPIC TALES Continue reading »
Articles on the upcoming Epic line of PowerBooks are starting to pop up here and there. Computerworld (Aug. 26) announced that Epics should be available starting in November. Apple’s notebook computers currently rank number nine in sales. The Epic “will be based on the 603e PowerPC processor.” A new stab at laptops is long overdue from Apple as far as the industry is concerned. The much-hyped release of several PowerBooks last summer fizzled when the computers started exhibiting strange behavior – [Suggest: little things] like cracking open and catching fire. Meanwhile, it is reported that IBM’s plans for IBM ThinkPads running the Mac OS have been killed, at least for sales here in the States. They might turn up in Japan, but the U.S. will get something (less powerful) called a ThinkBook.
PLUGGIN’-IN
InfoWorld (July 15) reports Netscape and Apple are talking about writing Netscape plug-ins as OpenDoc parts. “Such an agreement could lead to a modular, application-on-demand environment that could make network computers a reality.”
In the same issue, Robert X. Cringely (InfoWorld’s fictional computer industry gossip columnist) reports that IBM, using leverage I didn’t quite understand after reading the column, may manage to force Microsoft into a deal where it supports OpenDoc in order to keep using OLE.
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HORRORS! Continue reading »
The headline story of Infoworld ‘s June 24 issue was on the alliance Apple and Microsoft have entered into to develop multimedia standards. One result will be the integration of Apple’s QuickTime into Windows 95. (It does send chills up the spine, doesn’t it?) Infoworld columnist Michael Vizard explained the phenomenon this way: “…the biggest single dynamic now driving industry alliances is simple, outright fear. And to be quite frank, this is an incredibly good thing.” For Mac lovers, it may be a great thing. In these pioneer days of the Web, Apple has gotten some of its most important technologies adopted by cyberspace’s biggest player.
Media reaction to the recent Apple software developers conference was decidedly … mixed. Mixed, but easy to find; most of the major computer publications covered new Apple CEO Gilbert Amelio’s speech to the developers explaining it as the outline for his vision of the company’s future and Apple’s goals for the Internet. Some magazines said Amelio’s plans to reorganize the company are a positive sign that the company has properly placed its bet on Internet development. Others reported that there was more for consumers to be pleased with then businesses.
Web Week seemed very happy with Cyberdog in its May 20 review of the new program. Covering briefly the blizzard of features offered by the browser tool, the magazine stated, “If nothing else, the new product proves that Apple still is a fun-loving bunch.” They also recount with some amusement the story of how the code name for the product was so popular with Mac users that it became the actual product name, despite the obvious negative puns it will inspire if the product fails.
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