Nov 95 Opinion Columns

BY: Cheryl Currid

We've already made the leap in software. Suites that bundle diverse applications abound. Hardware is becoming equally versatile. Big names like Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Lexmark, Panasonic, Brother and a host of others have introduced combination printer-fax-copier-scanner devices. This move toward multifunction technologies brings both good news and bad.

First, the good news. Most multifunction products incorporate sensible features that provide additional ease of use and integration.

Who wouldn't welcome a utilities set that comes "free" with your office productivity suite, for example?

Integration brings more good news. Most new multifunction products were designed to work together. They weren't just bound together with baling wire. The goal was to make these products seamless, so users don't have to struggle moving data around or getting to all the products' features and functions.

Another benefit is increased productivity. Multifunction hardware devices make good use of precious desk space. Put one on or near your desk, and you can eliminate trips to the copier, the fax machine or the network printer.

And these products are almost sure to save you money. You can buy software suites for less than what you paid for the individual packages a few years ago. Traveling Software's five-in-one communications package sells at a substantial discount over the separately purchased products. And the multifunction printer-fax-copiers cost only slightly more than any one of the three standalone machines they replace.

Some integrated products also make newer technologies more affordable. For instance, you may not be able to justify buying a color copier, but you just might spring for a color printer. Tektronix last year introduced a moderately priced add-in device called the Tektronix Phaser CopyStation. The $1,695 unit hooks up to Tektronix 340 and 540 printers, transforming them into color copiers. The tight integration between the scanner and the printer's image-rendering hardware and software keeps colors accurate. And the CopyStation operates alone, so you don't have to have your computer turned on or the network connected in order to use it.

Compromise is the worst aspect of multifunction products. Because they come packed with so many features, you don't necessarily get the best of breed in every component. Software suites, for instance, make the selections for you, so you don't always get the product that best suits your needs.

You also get locked into a particular vendor's products. For example, if your company is using Microsoft Office, but you'd rather create your presentations in Lotus Freelance, you'll have a hard time justifying the purchase. You either have to buck the corporate standard or learn to love PowerPoint.

The same goes for hardware. To keep prices reasonable, vendors make compromises. The printer on that multifunction printer-fax-copier you just bought might be slower than you'd expect for the price. Some print only two to four pages a minute, versus the six to 10 you'd get from a similarly priced standalone printer. Further, most multifunction devices use ink-jet technology at 300x300 dots per inch (dpi). That pales in comparison to a low-cost 600dpi laser printer's quality.

A multifunction product can save you money and increase your capabilities, but in some cases a single-function product may better suit your needs. It all depends on your specific situation.

My tea leaves tell me vendors will introduce more multifunction products at Comdex this month. I expect the aisles to be lined with second-generation products that incorporate numerous functions. If you determine a well-integrated multifunction product can save you space, time and money, run--don't walk--to buy it.

Keep your eyes peeled for the fall lineup. You may want to start your Christmas shopping early. Or wait until next month, when I'll give you my annual roundup of picks for those last-minute budget dollars.

BY: Fred Davis

You gotta love progress. The Pentium was a quantum leap over the 486, and the P6 is yet another forward stride. Windows 95 greatly improves the look and play of Windows 3.1. Video cards now display photorealistic color as a matter of course. Hard disks have shrunk in cost and size, but hold more data than ever.

And the PCI bus blows the doors off the old ISA bus. But my floppy disk drive is one system component that hasn't seen improvement in ages.

Let's face it. The diskette is obsolete.

Not many of my files fit on a single diskette, and certainly none of my programs do. In fact, I'm tired of shoving diskettes by the fistful into the floppy disk drive just to install one software program. The floppy disk drive has seen its challenges--from Bernoulli to floptical--but none have caught hold.

But now the diskette has finally met its match: the CD-ROM.

CD-ROM drives have already become as common as floppy disk drives on new systems. The problem is the CD-ROM is a read-only medium, so you can't write on the disc, right? Wrong! You can, thanks to the amazing CD-R technology. You'll be hearing a whole lot more about CD-R in 1996. It stands for CD recordable and is the moniker of a new generation of CD-ROM drives that can both write and read CD-ROMs.

The catch is, with CD-R you cannot delete or modify data once it's recorded. Multisession CD-R technology allows you to add data to a blank CD-ROM multiple times until it is full (up to 640MB). The permanence of CD-R is not a giant drawback, and in some cases it can be beneficial. You can't overwrite or delete important files, for instance.

Although recordable CD-ROM drives have been available for several years, they were way overpriced, way underpowered and used software that didn't work well. The emerging CD-R drives solve those problems and make recording a CD-ROM as easy as writing to a diskette.

CD-R is the very best way to back up your hard disk. Instead of searching through a linear backup medium, such as tape, just pop a CD-ROM into your drive and your backup looks like an ordinary storage volume. Because CD-R only lets you write on the disc once, there's no chance you'll accidentally erase your data. Backing up onto a CD-ROM is also fairly fast. It only takes a half an hour to back up 640MB worth of data using a double-speed CD-R drive, and only 15 minutes with a quad-speed CD-R.

Better backups, however, aren't the biggest payoff of CD-R. The technology's real promise lies in its ability to turn a CD-ROM into a "printer" for multimedia and other rich data forms. Back in the old days of mainframe and minicomputers, you mostly worked with text and numbers. With today's PCs and modern graphical user interfaces, you're also handling graphics, video and sound. If you assemble a snazzy presentation with video and sound effects, even a color laser printer won't do it justice. To "print" your creation, you need a CD-ROM and a CD-R.

As more of the data we use evolves beyond two-dimensional text and graphics, traditional printers will become less appropriate as the computer's primary output device. Instead, we'll need a digital medium that can capture video, sound, 3-D space, Web pages and the other information-age data sources. CD-ROM may not be the ideal medium, but it's the best one we've got. More importantly, it's the only device with enough critical mass to rise above competing technologies.

With the installed base of CD-ROM drives projected to zoom above 50 million anytime now, it's a safe bet that any serious Windows user has a CD-ROM drive. This sets the stage for CD-R, because anything you write on a CD-R drive can be read on any of these nearly 50 million systems. No other storage format can claim this broad compatibility with the installed base.

I'm so bullish on CD-R that I predict it will be a standard item on most new PCs within two years. This has a lot to do with something computer users really love: rapidly dropping prices. CD-R prices have already started to sink like a rock. Single-speed recorders were $5,000 just over a year ago. In the beginning of 1995, the price of double-speed recorders fell to $2,500. By summer, you could get a double-speed CD-R for $2,000 and in August, Pinnacle Micro dropped the retail price of its double-speed CD-R to $1,295. Predictions are that several manufacturers' prices will drop below $1,000 by mid-1996. Coupled with the CD-R drive price decline, there's been a corresponding plummet in blank, recordable CD-ROM prices. What cost $40 apiece last year I can now pick up for well under $10.

As CD-R prices drop, you'll start seeing them on more desktops, and people will discover all the cool things they can do with them. Did I mention that you can record your own audio compilation CDs for the car? I predict CD-R will become one of next year's key nerd status symbols, which will ultimately create a high-tech snob appeal and consumer frenzy for the device. Computer manufacturers--always striving to differentiate themselves from the competition--will offer CD-R as a standard item. As soon as a few big players break ranks with this offering, the others will be sure to follow. And that's why I think it won't be much past 1997 before prices drop so low, desirability soars so high and the competition waxes so fierce, that a CD-R will be standard on every PC.

I've been living in the future for the past few months, going crazy with a Sony CD-R that's in my office. It didn't take me long to realize that CD-R is actually a better printer for many projects I used to print on paper; my double-speed CD-R can print hundreds of thousands of text pages onto a single CD-ROM in about half an hour. It would take days, many reams of paper and a mountain of toner cartridges for my printer to do the same thing. Not only am I kinder on the environment, but it's easier to find something by "flipping" through on-screen pages. The combination of convenience and capability is so good, I can't imagine not having CD-R as a standard part of my computing setup. So, good-bye floppy, and move over, printer, here comes the CD-R.

BY: Mark Hebert

That's how I'd begin my speech to the Windows Graphic Designers Anonymous group.

"I lie on interviews," my speech would continue. "I never put words like Windows on my résumé. When I'm seeking employment I say, `I have a Mac IIci at home.'

"I get away with it every time, even though 90 percent of my portfolio was produced using a Windows PC with QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Micrografx Designer. Output is output."

This isn't as far-fetched as it seems. Most ad agencies, publishers and in-house art departments use Macs. If I didn't know how to use a Mac, I'd starve.

A recent issue of Publish Magazine reported that Quark sold only 50,000 copies of QuarkXPress for Windows, compared with 450,000 for the Mac. Quark released only 40 Xtensions for the Windows version. That number has since increased to 60--but compare that with 231 for the Mac version.

The article didn't mention how many copies of QuarkXPress for the Mac sold during its first year, or how many Xtensions were available then. Nor did it address the effect of Quark's nonexistent competitive upgrade policy or high street price ($700) on sales of the Windows version.

Another article told of a recent industry conference, at which analysts stated Windows 95 would not be a viable alternative to the Mac even with better built-in PostScript and graphics support.

This is pure Mac bias. Windows is as viable a multimedia, graphics, 3-D, publishing platform as the Mac. There's nothing I can do on a Mac that I can't do on a PC. And because I don't have the hardware costs Mac artists must factor into their bids, I can underbid them. That's a big competitive advantage in the graphic design world. It gets even bigger in the 3-D animation field when you compare the "cost to production minute"of a hot-rod Mac 3-D system to a vanilla 486 or Pentium system running 3D Studio.

I've faced discrimination because of this Mac bias. Employers have told me because I know PCs I'm not really Mac-literate. Even when I implore them to test me free of charge for a day, they smile and dismiss me like I'm some naive rube.

Only once by stating on my résumé that I knew Windows did I get a job designing on the PC. Last summer I was associate art director for two issues of PC Graphics & Video Magazine. I got the assignment only because the magazine was created and produced on the Windows platform, and the publisher was having a tough time finding an art director or graphic designer who knew Windows.

It felt odd producing a magazine on a PC while the company produced its other magazines on Macs. But I had a lot of fun creating with the Windows versions of QuarkXPress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Micrografx Picture Publisher, PhotoStyler, Kai's Power Tools, CorelDRAW and Fractal Painter, because I really knew what these programs can do.

This led to an art director position with another publisher that used Macs exclusively. The company couldn't tell from my samples, and I didn't bother to explain that I produced two issues of a full-color magazine on a PC running Windows. I wasn't about to stir up any dormant Mac bigotry--hey, I needed the job.

Now that I'm freelancing again, I'm still fooling my clients. When they supply me with Mac-formatted disks, I use a utility called Mac See, which reads Mac-formatted 3.5-inch and SyQuest disks. This way I can sneak files in and out of my 486DX2 system undetected by the Mac user's eye. And the output still comes out as, well, output.

This is something PC publishers don't seem to get. I recently completed an assignment at Western Digital, maker of PC graphics cards and hard disks. Its art department was stocked with Macs. When are PC people going to stop listening to vendors and start telling them what to do? If you told them you have only DOS/Windows file output, they'd bend over backward to accommodate you.

"When the last Mac comes off the assembly line in a few years, I'll finally come out of the closet," my speech would conclude. "I won't need to hide that I'm a Windows artist. Indeed, it'll be my strongest selling point."

BY: Mike Elgan

In the April issue of WINDOWS Magazine, I wrote a column about the pathetic quality of so many CD-ROM content titles available for Windows. I complained about the bugs, incompatibility, poor performance, sloppy coding and bad content that characterize some of them. I pointed out that many of the companies that make these titles can be less than caring about how their CD garbage affects consumers.

Boy, did that column ever strike a nerve! Readers flooded me with horror stories of living through the CD-ROM hell I described. Here are a few examples.

Tom Patten, Martinez, Calif.: "Your article struck a nerve! [Author's note: See? I told you!] A multimedia title I bought wouldn't run when I loaded it, and it didn't include any troubleshooting information. I left two voice-mail messages with the company and sent a letter. I never received a reply."

Derek Atlansky, via the Internet: "A CD-ROM I bought froze constantly. The manufacturer's tech support said it was incompatible with my setup and there was no way it would ever work. He told me to return it. But the store wouldn't take it back because the package had been opened."

Lisa Smith, Arlington, Texas: "A children's game I bought freezes in several places. When we make it through the initial screen, it freezes someplace else. I have plenty of RAM and hard disk space, and the installation program confirmed that my sound settings are all right. `I'm sorry, son. Mommy can't make it work!'"

Char Ham, Pomona, Calif.: "It's slow to boot (and sometimes requires several attempts), constantly crashes, and the video image sometimes disappears."

John Sullivan, Plymouth, Minn.: "The covers are nice. But it's fluff with little useful content."

Brian Rom, New York: "I get `Out of Memory' error messages after I use the program for more than 10 minutes. I have 16MB of RAM, and nothing else running."

John Fiero, professor of English, University of Southwestern Louisiana: "Educational titles are designed by people who haven't a clue as to what's useful in a classroom. They're arming my more conservative colleagues with the ammunition they need to shoot down funding for multimedia labs on school campuses."

Joe Majchrowicz, Loveland, Colo.: "Very slick graphics on the outside, but when you run the game, it looks like a 10-year-old Atari package."

Paul Arnote, via America Online: "In a photo-collection CD-ROM I bought, the photos are too dark, out of focus or crooked to be of any use. Granted, this is low-cost software. But because of my software retailer's strict no-return policy, I'm stuck with it."

Chuck Giftos, via America Online: "... when I put the disc in, I get a message that says, `There is no disc in drive D. Please insert and try again.'"

The problem is that shovelware vendors are rewarded for selling garbage.

By investing too many resources in packaging, marketing and distribution--and too few in development, testing and tech support--some CD-ROM vendors make a lot of money on worthless products. It's an outrageous scam. What's worse, they give CD-ROM titles a bad name, and that hurts companies that put out quality CDs.

You usually have no way to try before you buy. And that's not right. But you can do something to protect yourself: Don't buy any CD-ROM title unless you get an unconditional money-back guarantee. If you don't like the CD, return it. Don't pay good money for bad software.

You may have noticed I avoided naming the bad software titles my readers complained about. Some of the letters I received asked me to bash specific companies in print.

Here's why you won't see that in this space: It's irresponsible.

Any list I could compile from anecdotal information would be inherently unfair. Some CDs received the lion's share of complaints--but they also happened to be the biggest sellers. If company A sells five times as many titles as company B, it should have five times as many unhappy customers, everything else being equal. That doesn't mean its products are worse; it means it has five times the number of unhappy customers and five times the number of happy customers. If I were to slap together a list of titles, it would be statistically invalid. The number of complaints is only meaningful if you also know the number of customers who didn't complain.

Some readers may have thought the CD-ROMs caused their problems, when in fact the culprit was previously installed software or hardware, or poorly configured systems.

Also, buying a CD-ROM content title is a highly subjective and individual experience. One of the many problems with bad CD-ROMs is incompatibility. Some titles out there don't work with a large percentage of systems. But if a title works with your system, then it's not a problem for you.

The only way to decide if a CD-ROM title works on your system and is right for you is to install it and try it. And that's why the best way for you to deal with this problem is to find a quality vendor that's willing to offer a money-back guarantee.

If you want to hear from those willing to name names, stop by our online forums to see if anyone's had experiences--pro or con--with a CD title you're considering.

And for those of you buying Win95 CD-ROM titles, drop me a line and let me know if they're any better, or if the CDs you buy are just 32-bit garbage.

BY: Fred Langa

Many of you wrote to me about my October editorial discussing the enhanced DriveSpace 3 that's part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack. Some of the calmer letters took a decided "Are you nuts?" tone. Others were out-and-out flames suggesting I was worse than nuts and that the only sensible way to increase disk space was the good old-fashioned method of buying more platters.

Hang up those flamethrowers. In the early days, some disk compressors were indeed bad news. They were exotic add-ons that diddled with your system at a very fundamental level down in the guts of DOS, making the system do things it wasn't designed to do. If anything went wrong, it was often catastrophic. The earliest adopters of disk compression technology too frequently lost the entire contents of their hard disks.

That was then. In recent years, disk compressors have become robust and reliable. And with Win95, Microsoft has built basic disk compression right into the operating system. Now, you can roughly double your effective disk space with essentially no added risk. (In fact, with a good backup system, the risk is literally zero.)

The Plus Pack's DriveSpace 3 goes a step further than Win95's standard compression. DriveSpace 3 is capable of standard DriveSpace compression plus two higher levels of compacting, HiPack and UltraPack.

HiPacked files take a bit longer to write to the disk but are faster to read. This type of compression is ideal for .EXE, .DLL and similar files that are normally written once (at installation) and then read only from the disk. With HiPack, you can save space and time.

UltraPack squeezes files even tighter. It's best for dense archival storage of little-used files that you still want handy. UltraPacked files occupy minimal space but do take a bit longer both to read and write.