Now it can be told. Here are all the snide innuendos, the catty bag emptyings, the bitter recriminations of four years at the pinnacle of personal computer professional software development magazine publication management. Yes, in the honored tradition of former insiders like Donald Regan, Larry Speakes, and Martha Mitchell, here is the Mike Swaine kiss-and-tell flame.
Laird fidgeted nervously as he announced the postponement of the managers' meeting. He claimed that he was doing it because the ad sales managers were out of town, but I knew it was really on the advice of his astrologer. After all, the sales managers were always out of town when there was going to be a managers' meeting.
I admired them for that.
I, of course, was ever the model manager. I must have modeled for about a dozen of those column photos. But besides that, in the four years of my administration as editor-in-chief, circulation quadrupled, ad revenues skyrocketed, and the magazine went from being a struggling nonprofit venture to being the cash cow of the company. I was entirely and personally responsible for this success, to say nothing of the trend in the number of editorial pages delivered per month. I said to say nothing of the trend in the number of editorial pages delivered per month.
Since leaving office, I have had the opportunity to look back over the years at M&T and before that at CW Communications and to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the computer press. Sitting here gazing out across the Pacific, I've finally been able to put it all in perspective. I have concluded that most of the leaders in the field would have their vision improved by being outfitted with glass navels. Here's my four point plan for dealing with the computer press:
Now if nobody minds, I'll get back to the true mission of this column: biting the hand of the computer industry. Enough of this kiss-and-tell stuff already.
I predict that large chunks of Teflon will chip off John Sculley as a result of an anonymous kiss-and-tell book. Curious technical passages will befuddle reviewers until it is learned that the book is actually a draft of the manual for the NeXT computer.
I predict that Apple will not introduce card racks into the next version of HyperCard and that ex-Xerox PARCer Paul Heckel, author of ZoomRacks and The Art of Friendly Software Design, recently granted a patent for the card-rack metaphor, will not sue Apple, although he will continue to end every sentence with "if you know what I mean." I predict that Heckel will write a book about PARC, if you know what I mean. The book will make heavy use of analogies to the film industry and nobody will know what it means.
I predict that, again this year, no kiss-and-tell books will be coming out of IBM.
Michael Swaine editor-at-large
Enough. I hated the kiss-and-tell genre to begin with, and although I thought the parody was extremely broad, Jon and Peter hated the first two versions of this k&t column. If you hate this one, blame them. Just kidding, heh, heh. The fact is, I am grateful to and fond of the magazines I've worked for, even when I have had to do three versions of a column. But even if I weren't, I'd never write another of these damned k&t columns: the genre doesn't deserve the respect of parody. The only truly serious point in all of the above pseudovituperation is this: when you deal with the computer press, you are still chiefly dealing with amateurs. Don't trust us blindly.