Apple is starting a consumer-products division. Apple is not well known in this market, and traditional consumer-goods vendors might say that this market is not well known at Apple. Perhaps a word of advice would be appropriate. Perhaps it would even be appreciated.
Rumor has it that one can see, taped to a wall here and there in Apple's Cupertino quarters, copies of a letter from Stan Cornyn, president of Warner New Media. Excited by the prospect of Apple getting into consumer products, Cornyn had written to share his thoughts on how Apple could avoid getting Betamaxed out of the market. I here reproduce the letter, which Cornyn doesn't mind the world seeing, in full.
The story that this list can be seen taped to the walls at Apple is not surprising. Apple seems to be very serious about the consumer market, recognizing, as its legions of unsolicited advisors would like it to recognize, that the consumer market is not just another niche, not even just another market in the sense that video professionals are another market, but something quite different from anything Apple is used to. Apple is going to go after the consumer market via a new, separate division of the company. That's a promising sign, although the initial forays into the consumer market look suspiciously like spin-offs or repackagings of existing computer-division products and technologies.
In any case, along with the spin-off companies Kaleida and Taligent, it looks like Apple's new strategy is divide and conquer, in the amoebic, rather than the Napoleonic, sense.
Here's a mid-year summary of developments in three areas holding a lot of Apple's attention lately: multimedia technology, the home and/or consumer market, and its more traditional hardware and operating-system efforts.
Kaleida, the multimedia company, has a CEO: Nat Goldhaber. Theoretically, the company was launched last October and apparently some not-so-theoretical work was getting done under its nameplate, but it's hard to take a company seriously until it has a CEO. Goldhaber has been bouncing around the Mac universe for a while; he was one of the founders of Centram, the developer of TOPS.
QuickTime has caught on. One Apple competitor, Silicon Graphics, is reportedly negotiating to license it, with the fairly obvious intent of using it to make SGI's low-end Indigo (described here in February 1992) even more competitive with Apple's high-end Quadra line for video professionals. Currently, the Indigo is clearly a better deal than a Quadra on a hardware basis, but SGI has nothing like Apple's third-party software base. SGI machines, however, have very impressive video-editing and video-production capabilities, a point not lost on the some 300,000 video production professionals in the U.S., among whom SGI is highly respected. That includes the Hollywood types: SGI hardware was used in producing the special effects for Terminator II. SGI is also reportedly negotiating for new Apple imaging model technology.
Apple, eyeing those 300,000 video professionals and the future in-house video professionals in business and the potential VCR home-movie producers, would like to get some of that Hollywood credibility. The theory is that respect trickles down. If that's the theory, then Apple's visibility at this year's National Association of Broadcasters conference didn't hurt. Not only was Apple there in force, but there were also a lot of third-party products that showed off the Mac's capabilities for editing video, teleprompting, and communicating with various entrenched formats and devices.
Apple's PDAs, or personal digital assistants, are actually going to be called Apple Intelligent Assistants, or at least the first ones are. These handheld things, due out early next year but pre-viewed at CEBIT in Germany and CES in the U.S., are not really consumer products, but they do show Apple taking a step in the direction of toasterization. The original Mac, which many people thought looked like a toaster, was supposed to be an appliance. It wasn't, and subsequent tweaks moved it farther and farther from Toasterland, jumping the tracks at Computerville Junction. PDAs (aka AIAs) look like the first step Apple has made back in that direction since 1984.
Here's what the weeklies think the first AIA will be like: Due to ship in January 1993. Price under $700 and falling. RISC-based and faster than a Mac IIfx, hardware by Sharp, multitasking OS by Apple. OS to be licensed to other manufacturers. Pen-based, with no boxes to fit letters into, no training required (or allowed?), and no visible file system. Infrared link, serial port, able to dock to a Mac and maybe to a PC running Windows. Titles on SRAM cards being developed by third parties like Random House.
Apple's approach to these things apparently didn't sit well with Bill Atkinson when he was still with the company, and was reportedly the reason for his founding General Magic with Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat, where they have been pursuing the approach they think ought to be taken to handheld computing devices. Although they're very secretive and deny all published reports about what they're doing, their idea apparently has to do with an operating system for devices that communicate with other devices: cellular phones, handheld computers, and so on. Rather than producing a product and putting their label on it, they are pursuing licensing agreements. How this fits with Apple's efforts is unclear, but Apple (along with Sony and Motorola) is a big investor in General Magic.
Meanwhile, Apple is working on the multimedia Macs that it expects to put on the shelves for Christmas. The Apple version of the MPC, apparently. Perhaps as evidence that it is trying to learn how to address this market, the company recently: 1. Put together a computer+printer+software bundle for under $1000 (the OS and bundled software are on ROM); 2. has been evangelizing heavily for content providers for its multimedia Macs; and 3. brought out new, more powerful versions of its machines at prices lower than those of the machines they replaced. Apple is trying, folks.
And on the traditional Apple front, trying to convince corporate buyers that the Mac is not a toy, Apple has been hearing from other advisors. Consultants recently presented Apple with a list of priorities, high among which was, build us a dedicated server. Mac managers generally look elsewhere than Apple for server hardware and software, but Apple hopes to change that with its dedicated server, expected to ship in January 1993. It's a 68040 box without 24-bit color and other frills, and with A/UX as its native OS, but with support for Mac System 7 and System 6.
Oh, yes, A/UX. Apple's version of UNIX. One of the many Apple operating systems. Apple will be spending more time in the future supporting various operating systems, apparently. The Mac OS is getting reengineered and fitted with a UNIX-like kernel, and should be around for a while. The operating system being developed for the PowerPC architecture by the Taligent joint venture with IBM is being described as addressing a different market, although who knows what the story will be when it actually arrives.
When that day comes, a product from a Bell Labs spin-off, Echo Logic, should come in handy. FlashPort lets you port Mac applications to the PowerPC in days. This is not to be confused with the emulation option: The new operating system is supposed to run Mac software (and non-Mac software, too) at native 680x0 speeds via emulation modules called "personalities." FlashPort is an option between emulation and total reengineering: It involves a multistage analysis of program logic achieved through examining registers and is supposed to produce 90 percent of the performance of code written for the PowerPC. It will probably be very expensive, but Echo Logic is considering setting up porting centers where you can buy a port.
Apple, meanwhile, is making interesting moves toward another operating environment. QuickTime is not the only piece of Mac system software being ported to Windows; there are rumors of an Intel version of the Mac OS. Perhaps such rumors make Microsoft nervous; perhaps that's what they're for. Meanwhile, though, Apple's software subsidiary, Claris, is definitely porting its products to Windows, starting with a well-received port of FileMaker.
That's all strange enough, without NeXT negotiating something or other with Microsoft.
I want to wrap this up with a look at one Mac product, LinksWare.
LinksWare. Sounds like golfer garb, doesn't it? Little alligators on the shirts, sun visors, bad color combinations. Actually it's both a company and a product. The company is LinksWare Corp., 812 19th Street, Pacific Grove, CA 93950; 408-372-4155. The product is a clever idea, and that's chiefly what I want to present here: the idea of LinksWare.
Let me underscore that. This is decidedly not a review of the product, which I have yet to get to work quite as advertised on my system. Those last three words are significant, and could be the whole explanation; my Mac setup is a little nonstandard, and LinksWare is a small company with limited resources. The many-hatted LinksWare author Tracy Valleau shouldn't spend those resources on accommodating weird hardware and software setups. If it looks like an actual review of LinksWare is warranted, I'll test it on another machine.
Although LinksWare the company is small, LinksWare the product, or at least the idea behind LinksWare the product, is big. It's Ted Nelson's and Doug Engelbart's and Vannevar Bush's idea of hypertext. LinksWare is a tool for creating hypertext and hypermedia links between files. But it's a cleaner implementation, conceptually, than many I've seen.
LinksWare is not a separate environment like HyperCard. It uses files created by all the major Macintosh word processors and painting and drawing programs, and it can also create links to video segments recorded in Apple's QuickTime movie format. It doesn't modify the original files, so it can link to files on CD-ROM. It doesn't require any rekeying of data. It also doesn't require any programming or HyperCard-like manipulations.
It makes a clear distinction between the developer and the consumer of hypertext/hypermedia products. LinksWare, the developer version, costs $189 and there are no royalties on documents produced (or rather, linked) with it, nor any limitations on how you can distribute your linked hypertext. The supplied LinksWare Reader, which takes up 203K on a disk, uncompressed, is basically a full version of the product except that it does not allow editing or adding of links. LinksWare Reader can be distributed freely, including being bundled with your hypermedia documents.
LinksWare doesn't read every file format. It depends on Claris's XTND and DataViz file-conversion technology to read files produced by other programs. XTND works via translators kept in a folder. LinksWare is sold with many of the more common translators, but more can be added by dropping them in the folder. Translators are typically provided by interested vendors free of charge and distributed on electronic services. Many Mac products, particularly Claris products, come with a folder of translators.
Here's the short story on how it works, from the developer's viewpoint: To create a link using LinksWare, you click on a word or select an area of a graphic, then click on the file you want linked. In the current version, only words can be used as links in text files, but multiword links are planned for the next revision. LinksWare lets the hypertext author decide on how links should be shown to the reader: with italics, underlining, or whatever.
And here's how it works, from the customer's viewpoint: When perusing the hypertext created by LinksWare, the reader notices that a word is a link and clicks on it. The associated file is opened and displayed. A keypress dismisses it.
The full story, especially from the developer's viewpoint, is a little longer. LinksWare has several utilities for maintaining links: There is a file-finding routine that resurrects links when the files have been moved or renamed, and menus give direct access to link words and linked files. A hypertext document can span up to 795 separate files, with up to 127 links from each text file or 64 links from a graphic. There is a limit of 6000 link words and 10,000 links altogether.
That's the description of the product. Not a terribly complicated idea, is it? And yet, conceptually, it's closer to real hypertext than most of the products that are called hyper-something or other. If only it were built into the operating system; but no, not the operating system, because it ought to be machine-independent. If only it were--universal.
Like Xanadu, for which we are still waiting, Ted.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal21 Rules for Apple Consumer Electronics
Divide and Conquer
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