Dr. Dobb's Journal April 1997
The best magazine position statement I've ever come across was the tagline to Roger Price's Grump magazine, a sadly short-lived and truly odd tabloid from the early '70s. Price was the truly odd inventor of Droodles and Mad Libs and scads of other time-wasters of which you may or may not have heard. The Grump tagline, if I have the capitalization right, was "for people who are Fed Up with all the Dumb Stuff that is Going On." Should have sold a million subscriptions. Poor marketing, I guess.
The premise of this column ought to be something like that. This is "Swaine's Flames," after all. It ought to Grump about all the Dumb Stuff that is Going On in the computer industry. Well, it does occasionally, but it should be more Grumpy. I guess I'm just too nice. That's why I'm soliciting your help.
Not that you're not nice. Together, though, I think we can brew up quite a pot of bile. That's what the Hall of Flame is about. "Mike Swaine's Hall of Flame," along with its oddly familiar position statement, can be found at http://www.cruzio.com/~mswaine/. Please feel free to contribute your candidates for immolation via e-mail at mswaine@cruzio.com, or use the form at the site. Nominees should have done something truly Dumb, and it would be good if the Dumb Thing had something to do with the computer industry, particularly software development. Feel free to nominate candidates at any time. If there are enough good nominations over the course of this year, I'll pick winners for 1997 somewhere around next January.
To start your creative bile flowing, here are three nominees for what could be called the Lou Costello Award. You know: You may be Mr. I.M. Confident when your bat connects with the ball, but Mr. I. Dunno is always laying for you as you round third.
1. America Online. America's Userfriendliest Online Service has become the Nation's Most Annoying Busy Signal. They're begging subscribers to make less use of their service until they get more hardware deployed to handle the suddenly increased demand. After sending out more free-trial disks and CDs than there are people on the planet, exactly what did they expect?
2. Microsoft Slate. Plans to charge $19.95 for the Michael Kinsley-edited expensive-to-produce online magazine fell through. Microsoft is not the first company to snag its toe in the Web, but the ratio of Slate's projected price to what the market will actually bear (nothing) is impressive. Bill Gates, who had a pretty good feel for numbers, once deadpanned to me, in the days when Microsoft was just another software company, "IBM is a big company." Well, infinity is a big number.
3. NT on PowerPC. Oh, wait a minute. This is from the smart decisions folder. Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook Columnist Hal Hardenbergh recently asked me how many people were developing for NT on PPC, and I couldn't find any. Apparently, neither could Microsoft. Shrewdly concluding that that bird won't fly, that dog won't hunt, and that horse isn't ever going to wake up, Microsoft cancelled its NT for PowerPC efforts. For those who were paying attention, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Robert Herbold dropped a heavy hint not long ago when asked about the future of NT on PPC. "We are committed to anything that sells," he said. Whereas NT on PPC...Right.
Well, you get the idea. Now it's your turn.
--Michael Swaine