MacWorld Report (January 1995)
February 1995
My report from MacWorld in San Francisco comes in three parts. This first part is about the show floor and the general ambiance of what's hot. The other parts (perhaps more interesting) are about sessions I participated in, on the Macintosh in Client/Server Computing and Apple's Role in the Evolving PC Marketplace.
You’ll find those in the company file topic section under Apple.
The MacWorld floor had several themes:
Graphics Mania continued to be an overarching theme. Several clear sub-themes have now emerged:
• Multi-media content is now a substantial portion of the Macintosh software market. CD-ROM's were everywhere and the intellectual and aesthetic value of the content was substantially higher than before. CD-ROM is no longer just about games and educational software (or how many clip art images you can cram on one shimmery surface), although you could buy plenty of all of those things. But there were also wonderful experiences to be taken home and enjoyed, like Voyager's celebrity interviews with ergonometrician and Apple Fellow Donald Norman and AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. Each includes multiple books, a video of a lecture/interview, and other hitherto unavailable goodies. Or you might want Maus, a comic book on the holocaust, clearly for grown-ups, which in its CD-ROM form is greatly expanded and enhanced.
• Graphics vendors are no longer satisfied with offering an enormous (and very robust) graphics package. Besotted by the success of Microsoft in the Suite market, and noting that Corel is planning to create a Graphics Suite for the Windows platform, Macintosh Graphics vendors like Deneba have combined their graphics products with clip art libraries, related products (in this case DeltaGraphics' DeltaPoint) and other seductions. It's not clear how any of us are going to handle products which come on dozens of CD-ROM's. (My CorelDraw software with its libraries requires a bookcase shelf of its own.) Obviously, shared jukeboxes, rather than puny single desktop drives, no matter what their speed, must be part of the answer.
• Graphics success at the software level creates a need for color input and output. MacWorld had plenty of both. Color scanners and printers were everywhere. Prices are coming down; quality and resolution are going up. Users are going to want to use a lot more color. Now if we can only get a full color copier that does nice output at 10 or 15 pages per minutes for about 10 cents per page!
Newton Revived? There were a number of palmtop stories at MacWorld, only some of them Newton related. Newton itself was on view, with lots of bundled software. With Palm's Graffiti, it becomes a usable machine although, of course, not one that is handwriting-enabled.
The most interesting Newton-related event was the announcement of Motorola's Marco, a wireless palmtop device based on the Newton OS. Think of a Newton combined with a radio modem, all in a manageable 1.7 pound package. Marco can utilize either ARDIS or RadioMail for wireless messaging and EMail. Depending upon the software (Graffiti, for instance, is bundled) and the amount of communication services included, Marco is priced from $900 to $1,400 and shipping now. Still too expensive for the masses, but measurably more alluring.
Interestingly, Sony's Magic Link palmtop, based on General Magic's Magic Cap OS was also at MacWorld. We'd guess its link is its heritage (Marc Porat, the President of General Magic, is a former Apple manager, as are Magic Cap's designers) as well as its potential appeal to the unconventional and independently-minded customer one might find on a MacWorld exhibit floor.
Client/Server computing is now becoming a feature in the Macintosh world, too. Hardware and software was everywhere, and interest was high. (See the separate article on the session I chaired under Apple.)
An interesting and unexpected feature of MacWorld (and one that infuriated Apple and Claris executives) was a very open attempt by Microsoft to use the conference as a forum for recruiting and educating Macintosh ISV's to the Windows 95 platform. Special seminars on Developing for Windows 95 for Macintosh Developers were sold out within hours of being announced and ran to packed audiences for the run of the show. Microsoft points out that it's especially difficult for Mac developers to move to Windows since they think their GUI experience will transfer directly; they need help in understanding the differences and that was the point of the seminar -- as well as a pep talk on the economics of writing for the mainstream market.
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Entire contents © 1995 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.