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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: MacIntosh and the Emporor's clothes
Message-ID: <1661@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 4-Feb-84 19:34:04 EST
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1661
Posted: Sat Feb  4 19:34:04 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Feb-84 03:34:25 EST
References: <2415@fortune.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 81

> I find Apple's marketing approach (though superbly timed and coordinated)
> to be insulting to my intelligence. "You don't have to memorize all those
> commands".  So WHAT'S WRONG with memorizing stuff?  Is it really that
> difficult to learn new things?

I agree that the marketing approach to the Apple is annoying, but not because
the idea of a different type of user interface is unnecessary.  I find the
tone of the claims about the mouse to be irritating; they seem to imply
that the mere presence of the mouse is what makes the Mac wonderful, not
the idea of designing a user interface around the availability of fast and
convenient pointing devices.

Even if it isn't difficult to memorize or learn new commands, if you can
avoid doing so, why not?  It does take some work to learn a "traditional"
command syntax, and it does take some memory capacity; why not put that
brain power to better use?  Knowing all the intricacies of "nroff", for
instance, may be fun, but being able to avoid dealing with them is more fun -
the reason a person works with "nroff" is not that they want to learn something
neat and new, it's that they want to produce documents.

> Apple is taking the typical American marketing approach: create a need
> where it didn't exist before, then come up with a bunch of features to meet
> it.  Tell everybody how stupid they are and how difficult it is to use
> computers.  Make everything look really dark.  Then, voila! spring the
> answer  -- the mouse!!

I agree that their tone of "before we invented the mouse (a slight exaggeration,
but the names "SRI" and "Xerox" appear *nowhere* in their ads), computers were
impossible for anybody who wasn't a computer wizard to use" is typical annoying
marketing hype.  The mouse has been around for a long time before Apple appeared
on the scene, though, and many people from novices to wizards speak well of
them.  Lots of academic systems have them, Xerox is using them heavily, and Sun,
NBI, and everybody else building a UNIX desktop bit-mapped-display workstation
seems to be using them.  I've used the mouse on the Star and the Lisa, and the
desktop user interface is nice (I'm curious how far that interface style can
be pushed; how about a desktop-oriented shell or "make"?  Remember, the current
"OS types a prompt, you type a command back with the syntax  
" user interface is an idea that was prompted by the advent of
computers with interactive printing terminals, so the appropriate user interface
may be conditioned by the technologies available.).

> Really, you need a mouse with a word processor or spreadsheet like you need
> automatic transmission.  It's a nice feature to have but you can learn to
> get along without it.  My question is.  Is the extra functionality worth
> the extra price?  I'm afraid that this message won't get home to consumers
> amidst all the glamour and hoopla.

Again, just pasting a mouse or icons onto the side of an existing system isn't
the major advance that the computer companies are shamelessly touting it as.
However, "now that we have a convenient pointing device and a screen
on which we can put complex images, what kind of user interface would we
do given a clean slate?" is a question worth asking.  It may produce a lot
of dumb ideas, but it's worth a try.

> Now for the finale.  Last year the buzzword was integration.  You couldn't
> possibly function in the office and keep your boss happy without integrated
> software.  Where's the integration with the MacIntosh?  Can we forget about
> integrated software now?

Unfortunately, what's happening is that there's a lot of marketing hype
about new and useful ideas which drowns out the contents of the idea.  It's
nice to be able to represent data in a fashion that permits multiple styles
of accessing them; for instance, the ability to take data from a spreadsheet,
graph it, and put the data and graphs into a document along with figures from
a database and paragraphs from a report you got by dialing into a news
service and send that report out by electronic mail.  Unfortunately, people
with minimal understanding of what useful ideas like different user interfaces
or integrated software get into the loop and suck all the semantic content
out of the words describing those ideas, turning them into buzzwords.  The
Lisa's software is fairly well integrated; the Mac doesn't have as large a
collection of Apple-written applications so there's not as much to integrate.
If you have a word processor written by one company, and a spreadsheet
written by another, and a terminal emulator written by a third company, etc.
the chances are good that it'll be hard to move information between their
files.  Yes, you can live without a desktop-style user interface and an
integrated collection of application software.  But it's a lot nicer to
have them, and if you're starting a system design you might as well do it
right if it doesn't cost much more.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy