Jan 1996 Opinion Columns

by: Fred Langa, Editorial Director

Many of you wrote to me about my October 1995 editorial discussing the enhanced DriveSpace 3 that's part of Microsoft Plus for Windows 95 (a.k.a. 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 good 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 all 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 little added risk. (With a good backup system, which you should be using anyway, the risk can be 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 only read 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.

Like its predecessors, DriveSpace 3 works invisibly in the background. It's normally quite conservative: It doesn't automatically apply the CPU-intensive highest levels of compression unless and until you tell it to. A companion program called Compression Agent helps that process.

Out of the box, the Compression Agent assumes any file you haven't accessed in a month is ripe for dense archival storage, and automatically flags those files for UltraPack compression. (You can set the interval to be whatever you want.) You also can specify which levels of compression (none, normal, HiPack or UltraPack) to apply to each file, file type or directory. When you run Compression Agent, it dutifully trundles off across your disk, squeezing or fluffing all the files per your instructions.

It takes a while to run, so it's best done during lunch or overnight. (See the Power Windows column in the October 1995 issue for information on the Plus Pack's System Agent, which can automate all kinds of tasks like this one.)

But wait, as they say, there's more. If you have a large hard disk, compression software takes care of the associated wasted "overhead."

If you have a 500MB hard disk, for instance, DOS (and Win95) divides the space into 16KB clusters. This means if you save a 1-byte file to your disk, that file still will automatically and unavoidably consume 16,000 bytes of disk space. It's even worse with larger hard disks. If your hard disk holds more than about 528MB, you'll have 32KB clusters. That means saving a measly little 1-byte file will eat 32KB of disk space"--incredibly wasteful.

Disk compression software lets you avoid much of this waste. With DriveSpace 3, for example, a file can occupy as few as 512 bytes, so a 1-byte file wastes only 511 bytes"--not 16,000 or 32,000.

This reduced overhead really adds up. DriveSpace 3 made my 1-gigabyte hard disk look like 2.76GB. Plus, it saved me well over 300MB that would have been needlessly wasted by corpulent clusters.

If the phrase "disk compression" has you reflexively reaching for your flamethrower, maybe it's time for a fresh look. Whether for the efficiency of unwasted cluster space or for elbow room on diminutive hard disks, modern 32-bit disk compression can be a nice addition to your system, especially now that other vendors are starting to ship their 32-bit disk compressors. You're not just locked into using Microsoft's solution anymore.

Now, may I please get out of this flameproof suit?

by: Mike Elgan

This year, banks and software vendors will wage a bloody war over the future of banking. Even international financial behemoths are scared to death of the comparatively small Intuit and Microsoft. The two companies have been jockeying for control over online banking standards ever since the U.S. Justice Department derailed their merger.

You may scratch your head at my characterization of Microsoft as a "little software company." But compare Bank of America's assets of $228 billion and 97,500 employees to Microsoft's less than $10 billion in assets and 18,000 employees"--they're in different leagues.

The notion of a couple of software makers scaring banks with cheap consumer products like Quicken and Money may seem absurd. Fewer than 10 million people use personal finance applications, and only 400,000 to 700,000 use PCs to bank online.

But although most Americans still bank the old-fashioned way, a widespread infrastructure for a fully digital banking future is forming behind the scenes at a breakneck pace. The American Bankers Association predicts the number of medium to large banks (with assets of $1 billion or more) offering PC-based transactions will nearly quadruple this year, from 11 percent to 42 percent. Not surprisingly, huge advertising campaigns are in the works that will introduce millions of Americans to the wonders of online banking.

Online banking makes current statements available to you 24 hours a day, and lets you pay bills with the click of a mouse. Bill-paying transactions are simple transfers from your account to the payee's. If the receiver can't accept electronic transfers, the service prints a check and mails it.

Much of the bill-paying is automatic: The software reminds you what bills are due when. No more writing checks or balancing your checkbook. No more licking stamps or shuffling off to the branch office. And it's cheap: about $10 a month or less. Savings in stamps and envelopes alone pay for the cost of service for most families.

Personal finance applications that support online banking, such as Quicken, Money and Meca's Managing Your Money, not only facilitate transactions but also keep track of them. They show exactly where your money goes by letting you slice and dice the data as you can with a spreadsheet. Some services even help you invest online"--buying and selling stocks, monitoring your portfolio and conducting research to stay on top of the market.

As the number of online transactions soars, banking steadily migrates into the familiar turf of software developers. The banks realize how little they know about this business, and that's why they're scared.

Banks win customers by creating a perception of security, stability and solvency. This perception is based on images of big, indestructible vaults (as if the banks keep all the money in there), towering pillars and solid names built around words like National, America and First. Customer loyalty is based on the psychology of trust.

Software companies are out to change all that. They want us to view banking as just another form of information processing, and money as just another form of information. They want to transfer customer loyalty from the trusted bank to the preferred software application. Financial institutions would become low-margin, invisible providers of services whose main feature is low cost.

As in the applications software market, the one who controls the standards of online banking wins. That's why Microsoft, Intuit, a host of technology companies and banks are scrambling to own the standards, and thus the future, of online banking.

Reacting out of concern that borders on panic, banks are doing everything from giving away copies of Quicken and Money to buying software companies to launching online services. But banks don't know how to compete in this new environment. That's why they're hitching their wagons to software and technology partners as fast as they can.

Bank of America and NationsBank bought MECA, which will offer Manage Your Money to bank customers and continue to sell it in retail stores. Digicash, Open Market, Block Financial Software, 4Home Productions and Netscape offer different software front-ends to banking services.

A 21-member consortium of American banks and technology companies is working on an initiative called the Electronic Check Project to make Internet-based checking available within two years.

That opens up the whole issue of security. Software vendors are responding to users' concerns by developing ways to protect online transactions. CheckFree Corp."--which provides the secure bill-paying back-end services for Quicken, CompuServe and Prodigy"--is offering a new product called CheckFree Wallet that enables secure credit-card transactions over the Web.

In September, Microsoft and new partner Visa announced their own means of enabling secure online credit-card transactions, Secure Transaction Technology (STT).

Netscape, MasterCard, IBM, Digital, CyberCash and GTE cried foul at the announcement. Complaining the standard wasn't open to competitors, they urged companies to support their acronym: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).

Despite all this competition, Microsoft and Intuit remain in the best position to control the future of online banking.

Though Microsoft dominates most of the software categories it enters, here it's playing the ill-fitting role of David taking on the online Goliath Intuit. There are more than 8 million Quicken users out there"--many of them fanatics"--versus fewer than 2 million Money users, despite a 450,000-unit giveaway of the Win95 version that expired last October.

Quicken 5 tends to get better reviews than Money for Windows 95. It's more powerful and offers more services for investors. The current version runs on both Windows 3.x and Win95; the current version of Money runs only on Win95. Each company has relationships with more than 20 major financial institutions.

Given Intuit's dominance, why is Microsoft even considered a contender? Because Microsoft is brimming with both vision and cash. Microsoft is in the unique position of owning an operating system (the operating system, really), an online service, a personal finance application, a huge Internet presence and a few billion in cash. Oh, and the company never gives up on what it considers a good idea.

So, Intuit and Microsoft are the favorites in the online banking race. You get to decide who wins when you go to your local computer superstore and buy cheap shrink-wrapped personal finance software.

No wonder banks are scared!

by: Fred Davis

The latest ladle of acronym soup being served up to Windows users is MPEG"--which stands for Motion Pictures Experts Group. MPEG is a standards committee composed of people from the motion picture industry and the high-tech world who got together a few years ago to develop a standard for compressing full-motion video for digital playback. That committee's work resulted in the MPEG standard, which has been around for a few years but has suddenly gotten a giant boost, thanks to"--you guessed it"--Microsoft.

Microsoft took a well-deserved drubbing for its anemic Video for Windows in Windows 3.1. With VFW 3.1, you could watch a jerky, postage-stamp-sized movie on your computer screen in what seemed like a pathetic imitation of Apple Computer's QuickTime. Because Microsoft wanted to make multimedia a Windows 95 cornerstone, it launched a vigorous campaign to promote MPEG as a primary video standard for Win95. The centerpiece of Microsoft's strategy is MPEG for Windows 95, a special software driver that Microsoft licensed from MediaMatics, a small MPEG developer. Although Microsoft couldn't include this in its initial Win95 version, the company is making it available to developers for incorporation into their products and will release it as a free add-on to both Win95 and Windows NT.

MPEG is a system for both encoding and decoding full-motion video, like movies or video clips. Software developers use special encoder hardware in the thousand-dollar-and-up category, such as the RealMagic Producer add-in card from Sigma Designs, which takes output and compresses it into the MPEG file format. To view an MPEG movie, you need an MPEG decoder, which can be hardware, software or a combination of both. Sigma Design's RealMagic card, which worked in conjunction with your computer's video card, was the first marketed product that allowed PC users to take advantage of MPEG. In addition, more than 60 other MPEG playback cards from a host of manufacturers are now available. These cards generally sell in the $100 to $300 range.

MPEG for Windows 95 enables a Pentium-class system to play MPEG-encoded videos without any additional hardware. Microsoft has pitched MPEG for Windows 95 as part of the newly announced Multimedia PC 3, or MPC 3 specification for multimedia computers. The MPC 3 spec calls for a system with a minimum of a 75MHz Pentium processor, 8MB of RAM, wavetable audio and a quad-speed CD-ROM drive. This specification is expected to be widely supported by hardware and software vendors as a minimum target for the next generation of entertainment and gaming software. Like most Microsoft products, MPEG for Windows 95 doesn't run well on the minimum configuration; in fact, you really need a 90MHz Pentium just to get so-so performance.

Normal videos display about 30 frames per second (fps) to fool your eye into seeing smooth, seamless motion. MPEG for Windows 95 running on a 90MHz Pentium will only play around 24fps, so the image will not appear quite as smooth as it should. In addition, MPEG for Windows 95 produces neither good sound nor accurate colors. The color problem also affects resolution, so that images appear chunky and splotchy. Why such poor video quality? To explain, I'll need to tell you a few technical details.

The type of MPEG used on PCs is called MPEG I, which specifies a 352x240-pixel output resolution. Since this is less than a third the size of your PC's screen, most MPEG decoders expand the image to fill the entire screen using a technique called upsampling. When the MPEG decoder upsamples an image, it replicates pixels to achieve the larger size. The exact technique used to replicate the pixels makes a real difference in the video quality. A simple decoder makes a straightforward replication, resulting in the worst quality. The better decoders use fancier tricks, such as interpolating the pixels and smoothing algorithms.

Microsoft's MPEG for Windows 95 employs one of the worst MPEG decoders I've ever seen. My suspicion is that MPEG for Windows 95 is really just a come-on for buying dedicated MPEG hardware, either on a separate card or as part of a new video card. After seeing some MPEG clips using MPEG for Windows 95, you'll be excited by the prospects of MPEG, but frustrated by the performance of the software-only approach.

This scenario fits in well with Microsoft's apparent overall strategy of making Win95 the decade's hardware upgrade engine. If you do get suckered into springing for dedicated MPEG hardware, at least you'll find a dramatic performance turnaround. The software-only MPEG for Windows 95 plays the MPEG video at 24fps, with AM-radio-quality audio, and sucks up just about all the processing power of a 90 or 100MHz Pentium. But if you add a dedicated MPEG decoder chip to lend the CPU a helping hand, you can play back a full 30fps video with CD-quality audio, placing only a 10 percent load on the rest of your system. A good hardware decoder also makes a full-screen image appear sharper because it uses fancy tricks to smooth out the pixels when it replicates them.

MPEG will become a major buzzword this year. You'll see it all over ads for most systems. But buyer beware! As I hope you've learned from this column, not all MPEG is created equal. For example, Packard Bell currently offers the software-only version on its systems, so you'll be watching some pretty murky movies. IBM is shipping MPEG on all its new Aptiva systems and uses a hybrid hardware/software approach that decodes the video using the system's Pentium, but decodes the audio using IBM's Mwave audio card. This intermediary approach provides better quality than going software-only, but still saps most of your system's horsepower. Compaq is taking the high road on some of its Presario systems by offering a full hardware MPEG decoder, which provides good quality video while minimizing the impact on system performance.

Because hardware MPEG decoders are the better way to go, the heated competition in the PC marketplace will drive this approach to the forefront. The next crop of PC video cards will offer MPEG as a standard feature, and pretty soon we'll see MPEG chips migrating to the motherboard. By 1997, just when MPEG I will seem like a stable standard, kaboom! It will be blown away by MPEG II, offering four times the resolution. MPEG II looks better than a TV screen.

by: Cheryl Currid

It's January"--time to start making good on those New Year's resolutions. It's also time for my annual plea to encourage you to work smart. If you work smart, you'll have more time to work out"--and follow through on a few of your other resolutions as well.

Working smart involves rethinking how you do your job. If your office is like most, you and your coworkers have probably transferred many legacy habits to your current jobs. Look around. How are telephone messages distributed?

Still using those pink message slips?

Who sets up meetings? Does your company continue to torture secretaries and administrative staff by making them call lists of people and manually coordinate the best meeting time and location?

Dig a little deeper. Are you using the right tool for the task? Do you use a spreadsheet as a glorified calculator? Do administrative folks use the tables in a word processor to calculate expense reports?

How does your company distribute information? Are your business presentations chock-full of boring lists? Do managers sleep during presentations, awaking only to render a decision?

I'm always amazed at the incredible misuse of technology. In many organizations, you see computers everywhere, but they don't contribute to the bottom line.

What's the solution? For starters, let's consider communications aids, group calendars, and user training and education courses. Communications aids combine several technologies.

Take clip art. Imagine you've prepared a business report and you want your audience to get the gist of both the good news and the bad news. Rather than force them to wade through nothing but boring lists of numbers or a gaggle of graphs, try supplementing your work with clip art. You could spread the good news by including an image of a cheerleader, a superhero taking flight or a person toting a bag of coins accompanied by the caption "We're crying all the way to the bank." You can transmit the notion of bad news quickly with a clip-art image of a golfer missing a swing, a worried man sitting at his desk with a downward-spiraling chart behind him or a businessperson perched in a tree with the caption, "We're out on a limb with this product."

One more tip: Put your pictures on the left side of a screen or page, and text or numbers on the right. According to brain-research experts, this technique wakes up both sides of the brain and gets the message across more quickly.

My favorite clip-art collection is Task Force from New Vision Technologies. Some of the characters had my staff ROFL (that's rolling on the floor, laughing). Along with the zany characters are plenty of images for more staid corporate cultures where humor isn't politically correct.

Color is another great communicator. It speeds the viewer's perception of trends by up to four times over black and white.

Fortunately, the cost of color has dropped considerably over the past few years. At the beginning of this decade, a decent color printer would have set you back $15,000 to $25,000. Today, Tektronix, Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard provide exquisite color output for a fraction of that cost. Top-quality color printers now range from $2,500 to $7,500 depending on the technology they use (laser, thermal wax or phase-change solid ink).

The price of LCD panels has also dropped. Expect to pay between $3,000 and $6,000 for a quality LCD panel. I'm partial to those by In Focus, Sharp and Proxima. Also, make sure you pair your panel with a high-intensity overhead projector. No dim lights, please!

By now, you may be wondering if the time it takes to shop for all this stuff, and then get comfortable using it, is worth the eventual productivity gain. It is. If you stick with it, you'll start preparing materials faster"--and, more importantly, your audience will make decisions faster.

And start using a group scheduler. I know I've sung this tune before, but I'll keep singing it until paper appointment calendars are driven from desktops. They should come with a warning label that says "Caution: This product may be hazardous to your company's productivity."

Do I sound too severe? My firm's research shows companies that still use paper calendars consume (make that waste) 20 to 25 percent of their administrative staff's time scheduling meetings and updating duplicate calendar copies. The situation is even worse for organizations slim on support staff where white-collar professionals may spend a day a week on administrative tasks.

I shudder to think that in this age of excellent group scheduling products"--Microsoft's Schedule+, Novell's Groupwise"--people still make meetings with only slightly modified versions of a quill pen and parchment tablet. This silently robs people of time they could spend on more productive work, and it artificially inflates staffing needs. Even if companies do buy group scheduling products, many workers in the organization barely understand how to use them.

This takes me to my last suggestion: training and education. Lack of how-to knowledge robs companies blind. Instructor-led courses, which cost $99 to $395 per person per day, are a small price to pay for increased efficiency. If that's too pricey, consider video and computer-based training courses. They're not as effective as live interaction with instructors, but they beat no training at all.

Special-interest groups within your organization are a good way to spread expertise and knowledge. Users can learn a lot from other users.

Some organizations prefer to import knowledge by hiring a consultant to teach users special techniques about technology. Just make sure someone opens the session with a discussion about choosing the right tool for the task.

If you need to justify training-course expenses, use simple math. If each person picks up only one tip from a course, then uses it to save 30 minutes per workday, that translates to 6.25 percent of that person's average work time. It adds up to 2.5 hours per week, or an average of $2,400 per year per person in labor savings. That sure sounds like a decent return on investment.

I'll bring you more productivity-boosting technologies and techniques later this year. In the meantime, Happy New Year and best of luck with your work-smart program.

by: Bradley Johnson

It's Windows 95. I'm wearing the "Been there, done that" T-shirt Apple sent to journalists as part of its "Windows Truth" campaign. The company's goal was to convince the world that Windows 95 is just a poor imitation of the Macintosh operating system.

Apple's partially right: Windows 95 makes an average PC clone almost as easy to use as a Mac. Windows 95 isn't as good as the Mac OS. It may not even be as good as IBM's floundering OS/2 Warp.

But in the technology business, "best" isn't good enough. Sony's Beta was the superior videotape standard, but most makers of videocassette recorders opted for VHS because Sony bungled its licensing strategy. Today, all the hit movies at Blockbuster are on VHS. With VHS, consumers got what they deserved: a competitive market for electronic hardware and an abundance of software. Ditto Windows 95.

And the Mac? Been there, done that. I'm using my Mac less and less, and spending more time on a Windows 95 PC. I'm happily buying into the Win95 hype. Masterful hype turns a good product into a global movement, and I don't feel like being left behind. If this software is good enough for my haircutter, a camera guy I met at a TV station and a cabbie, it's good enough for me.

Microsoft, other PC software and hardware makers, and retailers are spending an estimated $700 million on advertising and promotion to ensure that Windows 95 becomes the VHS of computers. The computer industry stands to make billions off the success of Windows 95.

But there's a downside to all this hype: The product can never live up to its buildup. As the young, obsessed managers at Microsoft like to say, Windows 95 isn't a cure for cancer. It can't even eradicate bugs. The software giant had to offer replacement disks to squash a bug just days after the product's introduction.

Bugs are inevitable in software, but the pressure is on Microsoft to fix them"--and not to leave customers stranded. Microsoft is pitching Windows 95 to millions of people who've never even used computers. If Microsoft doesn't deliver customer satisfaction, its reputation will crash faster than, well, the early Windows 95 beta it sent out last spring.

Fear not. Microsoft's campus is brimming with people driven to build good products, and the company can deliver on its promises. Bill Gates, best known for being the richest guy on Earth, is not P.T. Barnum selling his circus acts to suckers. And Windows 95 isn't New Coke, an overhyped product no one wanted. Win95 is what the computer industry and users want and need: a good product backed by a great vision.

In the ever-changing world of computers, Gates is selling a compelling view of where technology will take us. That's the sort of vision Apple founder Steve Jobs and former chairman John Sculley offered in the 1980s. Today, Apple has lost that vision thing, but Gates is seeing 20/20 through his smudged glasses. He's offering Windows 95 to take computer users exactly where they want to go today. For $89.95, Windows 95 is a bargain fare to the future.

Gates' salesmanship (read: hype) is causing hundreds of PC makers, thousands of software developers and millions of customers to buy into Windows 95, creating a computer supermarket of products. The combination of mass appeal and competition means this hype"--as with VHS"--is buying a good deal for users.

Microsoft appropriated many Macintosh features for Windows 95, so it's not surprising Microsoft also borrowed the concept of computer hype. Apple turned Macintosh into a global sensation with a 1984 Super Bowl commercial that suggested the new computer could save the world from Big Brother. Unfortunately, the original Mac didn't have the software to do that or much else. Because of bungled business decisions, what was called "the computer for the rest of us" is used by less than 10 percent of us.

By contrast, Windows 95 succeeds clunky, tired Windows 3.x, which is used on some 80 percent of PCs. Given that the world had already settled for bad Windows, the introduction of good Windows is something worth hyping.

Windows 95 is, to be sure, a media Circus Maximus. Microsoft encouraged the frenzy with an army of public relations executives and an aggressive effort to put early versions of Win95 into the hands (and PCs) of journalists. During the carnival-themed launch at Microsoft's suburban Seattle headquarters, some 3,000 journalists jostled for interviews with Gates, struggled to find an exclusive angle on the overblown story and searched for nonjournalists to interview. Not too different, perhaps, from the upcoming political conventions, except Gates has a higher ambition"--it's global domination, stupid!

This was "Boys (and Girls) on the Bus" at its best. Microsoft rented school buses to remove journalists from the grounds after the all-day event.

In the month leading up to the Aug. 24 introduction, journalists wrote more than 6,000 Win95 stories. During the week before the launch, TV stations and networks ran 345 segments on the topic, approaching the coverage devoted to Bosnia, according to Medialink Public Relations Research. During the three weeks leading to launch, NBC and its CNBC cable channel accounted for 70 percent of total Win95 coverage among the major network and cable news outlets. NBC and Microsoft, coincidentally, have numerous business dealings.

Microsoft doesn't deserve"--and doesn't claim"--full credit for this PR coup. "We just got the ball rolling," one PR staffer says. Then all media creatures great and small jumped in, not wanting to miss The Big Story.

A case of media lemmings rushing headlong toward the hype? There's no doubt a bit of that, but Windows 95 is worth writing about and reading about as a cultural and business phenomenon.

The birth of this savior is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Windows 95 arrives as the masses leap into the computer and Internet age. It's backed by every advertising and promotional trick imaginable, on an unprecedented global scale.

Like any pop culture phenomenon, Windows 95 has taken on a life of its own. But when Microsoft unveils the sequel in two to three years, it's unlikely the world will again stop to watch. The Second Coming happens only once.