6. Many software companies don’t offer enough guidance or other help.

Customers think, Why should I buy this program when they’re just going to ignore my problems once they have my money? The columnist counters: “That’s like saying, ‘I’ll just throw out the old Judeo-Christian ethic that it’s wrong to steal.’ The other guy being wrong doesn’t make you right.” ■ ■ ■ MicroPro’s responded to such competition by keeping WordStar but developing another word processor, WordStar 2000, aimed at offices that had shunned micros as too hard to use. WordStar 2000, named because MicroPro said it would stay modern into the next century, discarded most of the older program’s commands. There wasn’t one line of code from plain old WordStar. And WordStar 2000 couldn’t easily read its files—imperiling an industry standard that MicroPro itself had created. Moreover, it couldn’t run on less advanced micros like the Kaypro II. Machines in that vein were still good for word processing, and critics claimed that MicroPro had kissed off the 8-bit market. MicroPro replied that it had wanted to take full advantage of the hard disks and other capabilities that were showing up in powerful new computers such as the IBM AT.[21] WordStar 2000 did not run well on the slower floppy-disk machines. Its early version was pokey, moreover, even on an IBM XT hard disk computer. However, it indeed simplified WordStar’s commands and offered split screens, a form-letter program, a spelling checker that you could use as you typed a letter rather than having to leave the file to call up the speller, proportional spacing, underlining displayed on the screen, and the ability to go to specified pages—in other words, what one writer called “a catalog of wishes” for people using the older program. WordStar 2000 lacked a spreadsheet and sold for an outrageously steep $595; for $100 more you could buy WordStar 2000 Plus, which included a simple list-keeping program and software to help hook you up to other computers via phone. A slogan captured the MicroPro sales pitch: “Easy Word Processing You’ll Never Outgrow.” WordStar 2000 wasn’t “easy” word processing—all powerful products took some time to learn—but it was _easier_ than plain old WordStar. Footnote 21: “AT” stood for “Advanced Technology.” I went to a MicroPro dealers’ meeting just outside Washington in early November 1984 and saw a slick, professional sales campaign that would have done a shaving-cream maker proud. Company officials, including president H. Glen Haney, said WordStar 2000 wasn’t a fluke: “We’re going to repeat this process again and again.” Educators, even science-fiction writers, were said to have helped forty programmers make The Product easy to use. MicroPro billed 2000 as having been “beyond the capabilities of one or two genius programmers.” This philosophy, as much as anything, perhaps explained why Rob Barnaby was no longer with the company. Like many talented people, especially writers, he was the very antithesis of a team man. There was a difference between being one of forty programmers and _rrr_ing away in front of the keyboard at midnight while the head of the company watched. And yet as a user of WordStar I still hoped that Barnaby might return to the MicroPro fold. No matter how many creativity experts MicroPro brought in—and the company in fact had experimented with one—you could no more replicate a Rob Barnaby than you could a Welles or Mankiewicz. It was entirely inevitable that the MicroPro officials at the Twin Bridges Marriott felt compelled to say that 2000 was beyond one or two genius programmers. WordStar 2000 indeed had _some_ merits. Still, it was far from the earthshaker that the original WordStar had been. Barnaby and Rubinstein had so brilliantly conceived their program that it could hold back the competition for years and years. Well into the 2000 presentation at the motel, the room darkened. It was movie time. The dealers chuckled at “word processing throughout the ages.” A cartoon caveman wrote on stone, a Greek shuffled around stones bearing inscriptions for a temple, and a cartoon George Patton barked orders to the troops as part of a pun based on the phrase “command-driven word processor.” (See Chapter 5 for a definition.) MicroPro officials trotted out advertisements that would appear in the _Wall Street Journal_, _Fortune_, _Time_, and other major publications. The company was as proud of the ads as of WordStar 2000. A lie-detectorlike device, measuring electricity in the body, had even gauged test subjects’ responses to the copywriters’ creations. After lunch—salad, roast beef, potatoes, and a redemptive low-calorie dessert—MicroPro let the dealers try out WordStar 2000 themselves on IBM XTs and ATs. It was a combination sales talk and seminar. MicroPro quizzed the dealers with questions in the vein of “What do you like most about the product?” The session greatly increased the dealers’—and my own—understanding of 2000. At the same time, using a teacher-student relationship, MicroPro people fortified their depiction of themselves as the world’s top experts on word processing. Similar dog-and-pony shows would take place in cities across the country and overseas. MicroPro by now had four hundred employees worldwide and thirty-five hundred retail dealer outlets—a far cry from the days when Rob Barnaby had been writing WordStar in the room from which he’d displaced the electric-train set. If WordStar 2000 didn’t sell well, however, MicroPro would shrink into just another software company. It was a crucial time. MicroPro was deemphasizing products like data bases and spreadsheets, flaunting its reliance on word processing, and inspiring headlines like “MicroPro Back to Its Roots.” ■ ■ ■ How to Work on Two Files at Once While Using Plain Old WordStar =Windows=, among other things, let you view several files at once and move material back and forth (see Backup IX, “Window Shopping”). Even though plain old WordStar lacks windows, you _might_ be able to upgrade your software to include them. Ask your dealer about IBM’s Topview software and Microsoft’s Windows. ■ ■ ■ For Rubinstein personally, 1984 had also been eventful. He and his wife had separated—different interests, he said—and he had a heart attack. He had lost thirty pounds but had come back “stronger than ever.” Meanwhile, an initial public stock offering in March had made him richer than ever. It brought MicroPro $13 million. “After all is said and done,” Rubinstein told me about the offering, “I’ll end up with a little more than $5 million.” He already owned a gold-colored Corvette and a house worth hundreds of thousands. “And okay,” Rubinstein said, “so I’ll decorate the house. I’ll buy some furniture. So maybe I’ll spend another couple hundred thousand, but most of the money will be used for investment, not to go on some wild spending spree.” He said that “unless you’re a dissipated type, your life really doesn’t change.”[22] Footnote 22: _InfoWorld_, May 14, 1984, is the source of Rubinstein’s quotes about the heart attack, not going “on some wild spending spree,” and his life not changing. His corporate life, however, would be different. Perhaps chastened by Adam Osborne’s failure, some investors had insisted that Rubinstein give up control of MicroPro. He would still serve on the board. And he would help plot long-range strategy and develop new products, but the old entrepreneurial environment was vanishing at MicroPro and in much of the industry at large. The Osborne failure haunted Rubinstein in ways besides making money raising somewhat harder. Some investors in Osborne filed a suit saying that Rubinstein—owner of Osborne stock—had bailed out ahead of time, using insider knowledge. “It’s such hoked-up bullshit; it’s just ridiculous,” Rubinstein said in May 1984. He had “needed the money ... principally to pay my taxes.”[23] Footnote 23: _InfoWorld_, May 14, 1984, is the source of Rubinstein’s “bullshit” quote. By now, the sales of personal-computer software exceeded $1.5 billion a year.[24] Throughout the industry, accountants and others in three-piece suits were increasingly calling the shots. Marketing considerations—advertising, even the designs of the boxes housing the software—often overwhelmed technical ones. A word-processing program called Select typified some so-called user-friendly software aimed at the burgeoning market. Footnote 24: The $1.5 billion estimate is from Chris Christiansen of the Yankee Group. Backup: ◼ III, The Lucky 13: What to Look for in Choosing Software, page 302. 5 ❑ The Select Word Processor: Martin Dean versus the Command-Driven Restaurants “Gentleman Farmers” don’t appear just in whiskey ads. One showed up in _InfoWorld_—ballyhooing Select, a craftily marketed rival of WordStar. Embracing Madison Avenue-style tactics, software companies like Select Information Systems were luring some customers away from programs that would have been far better for heavy-duty business use. Select’s word processor retailed for about $500 in 1982, a year after its introduction, including speller and mailing list programs and a tutorial disk. Just WordStar—without accessory programs—listed for about the same. More than twenty-five thousand copies of Select sold in less than two years, and major manufacturers started offering it with their computers. I myself loathed Select. And yet I could see how the program could wow the throngs jamming their local computer stores. The tutorial disk was a salesman’s dream: he could walk away while the program baby-sat the customer tinkering with the computer. Select Information Systems, moreover, a forty-employee company in Kentfield, California, was running an advertising campaign as slick as any distiller’s. “No contest,” proclaimed a _San Francisco Examiner_ columnist in one ad in 1982, looking up from his Xerox 820, dangling a pair of glasses from his hand, like some refugee from a Famous Writers School. “Select was easier to learn.” The ads didn’t say what he was comparing it to, but a popular computer magazine named his equivalent of Brand X, WordStar. The columnist, Dick Nolan, never returned my calls, and Select wouldn’t put me in touch with the secretary featured in another ad, but I did track down “Richard Russell, Gentleman Farmer.” “Nebraska soybeans,” said the ad, “are Richard Russell’s business. But he rarely gets there. Richard manages his farms from a Victorian flat in San Francisco. And he does it with little more than a telephone and the SELECT Word Processor.” What was this, an ad for a word processor or a communications program? And yet the copywriter had done her job. I read on eagerly, curious about gentlemanly word processors—human or disk. “Select supports his interests as efficiently and often more quickly than could a well-run office back home. The briefest bank instructions or thickest annual report can be recorded in minutes and retrieved in seconds.” Was software so powerful? Maybe. The ad quoted Russell: “Select manages the business. I just reap the harvest.” The gentleman farmer, however, wasn’t mainly a gentleman farmer—rather, an interior decorator. “I spend more time doing that,” Russell told me when I called up out of the blue, “than on my farm operation, which is managed in the Midwest.” Then why be a gentleman farmer in the ad? “I think they just thought the idea of a gentleman farmer was more interesting than an interior designer,” Russell said. It must have been. He was deluged with calls, including one from NBC, which was in the thick of a computer series. Well, I asked, did he actually use the word processor? Yes, Russell said, but mainly in his designing business. It was a successful one, 20 percent commercial, 80 percent residential, including work on some mansions in the million-dollar range. “I design architectural interiors, furniture, fabrics,” he said, “the whole thing.” What did he most like about Select? “The self-teaching program was the main thing that appealed to me,” he said—the tutorial disk. I asked Russell about the cumbersome series of keystrokes that the Kaypro version of Select inflicted on people making insertions a few sentences back in their writing. He knew about the problem. And he knew about WordStar, too. “I’m a lot more aware of that since the ad ran,” he said of WordStar’s reputation as a powerful word-processing system, “but I don’t think I’m in a position to say much about it since I gave Select my endorsement. But you’ve brought up some valid points. The whole business of personal computers is new to me in the last six months, and so I’m learning about it, as well.” Russell said he used Select several hours a week, that he could legitimately endorse it even if he wasn’t actually using it mainly as a gentleman farmer. He was right. I didn’t question his basic sincerity. But for me, anyway, Select had proved tediously cumbersome. In early 1983 I called up Martin Dean, the head of Select Information Systems, and did the proper thing. “Martin,” I said in effect, “I hate your software.” Why gladhand information out of him, then stab him in the back? Dean was smart and a good sport. Not only didn’t he hang up on me; he spent an hour on the phone giving his point of view. Like the developer of WordStar, Dean had a philosophy, one born of his own business experiences—in this case, a WordStar debacle. He was a real estate lawyer eager for one of his staffers to work with a sophisticated word processor. “I handed her WordStar,” he told me, “and said, ‘It’s the standard in the industry.’ And she came back two days later and said she was not going to do that.” “She was vehement,” Dean said. She wasn’t going to spend the seventy hours she felt it would take to master WordStar. And she wasn’t “just” a secretary. She had a year of law school, had done ten years of legal secretarial work, and was supervising Dean’s legal research staff. “She’s one of the brightest women I’ve worked with in the legal business,” he said. “But she didn’t have the time to learn WordStar.” A major manufacturer had done a study comparing the two word processors’ learning time. “And my understanding,” said Dean, “is they determined it takes about fifty hours of working with WordStar to become as accomplished as you could become in ninety minutes of using Select.” I disagreed. WordStar took much less time for me to learn; Select, much more. With other people, it might be the reverse, but a good company normally wouldn’t have so much turnover that the employees would lack time to master a _decent_ word processor. Defending Select, Dean praised the tutorial disk and the program’s built-in memory aids. Want to erase? If you hit the “Escape” control and pressed the “E,” you’d eventually do that. Eventually. Dean and I went through a keystroke count. He claimed that actually his system—improved since the one I’d tried—was as fast or faster than rivals if run on the right machines. He said the Kaypro just wasn’t right for his program. “If you felt this way,” I asked, “how come you let it be bundled with the Kaypro?” Why did he and the Kaypro’s maker sign a contract that allowed Select to be the “free” word processor provided with the computer? “Well,” Dean said, “we had that version on the market only three months”—in 1982. Then, according to him, Perfect Writer underpriced Select. “Kaypro _then_ thought that was a bargain. They do not now.” “Why?” “Try to get a call through to their service department.” He was right. Kaypro owners were swapping war stories. Theoretically, Kaypro—not Perfect—would guide the owners through the software maze. Actually, it didn’t. Not always, anyway. I heard people at user groups deciding which machine to lie about owning so the Perfect Writer staffers would listen to their problems. Kaypro, in fact, dropped Perfect software in 1984 after dealers said they preferred WordStar. Okay, but what about my printer not underlining with the Kaypro using Select? Here again, Dean blamed Kaypro, and the printer maker, too, but I wasn’t about to zero in on who was at fault here. All I knew was that my daisy wheel wasn’t that exotic a machine. And yet, involuntarily, I’d been sold cumbersome software that, unmodified, did not even work right with the other parts of my $2,500 investment. You may love Select, maybe even after you’ve been running it a while. “Cumbersome,” remember, is my opinion. A _Washington Post_ staffer named Eugene Meyer, a Kaypro owner, liked Select and said the slowness “gives me more time to think.” He was working on a book around the same time I was and turned out one as long. “But,” I half joked, “if you’d been using WordStar, then you might have written one _three_ times longer than mine.” I called up Ben Shneiderman, an expert on matches between humans and software systems. Just what did an academic feel about Select-style systems and WordStar? Shneiderman, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and author of _Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems_, said: “Select has very few commands. There are very different people in the world. You’re very attracted to choice and options, and you seek the power that WordStar offers. But very simply, people are different. Some like to drive Maseratis, and some like to go twenty miles per hour.” He was right. There might even be a version of Select better than today’s WordStar; software is constantly changing, and when you shop, you must do your homework to make sure you’re buying the best program available for your needs at the time. But while I was writing this book, I loathed Select—even a version more advanced than the one for my Kaypro. Who, anyway, wanted to hire a typist content to do the keyboard equivalent of twenty miles per hour? And yet I tried to be tolerant. I hit the control key to fire up WordStar’s commands; Select users tapped “Escape.” “There are twenty-five thousand people happy with using ‘Escape’ instead of the control key,” Dean had told me, as patiently as a liberal Baptist explaining to a Klansman that Jews didn’t have horns. Certainly it was true: one man’s joy, another man’s plastic-disked kludge—that was software for you. And what you learned first was often your first love. A computer magazine even called one article “Getting Married to WordStar.” “Can you erase your memory modules?” Mark Robinson, a marketing man with Lexisoft, asked before he mailed me a copy of his company’s Spellbinder word processor. He had a point. I liked Spellbinder more than Select, much more, because it ran faster on the Kaypro, but I still could not abide by the need to enter a new mode to make insertions or corrections. It seemed inhibiting, this requirement, though perhaps more in writing than in secretarial work. Michael Canyes, a computer consultant, at the time loved Palantir. It offered many of the better features of both WordStar and Spellbinder and let a nonprogrammer set up the numbers pads of many computers to serve as function keys. Canyes also appreciated The Final Word, an excellent word processor for footnoting and other academic requirements. It was clear. There were serious alternatives to WordStar—some, anyway—even if, like the writer of the “Married” article, I was already well matched. In some ways, however, I felt uncomfortable about the general direction in which the software business seemed to be moving. Would less powerful but well-marketed products like Select drive out the future WordStars? _The_ WordStar had benefited from Seymour Rubinstein’s salesmanship. But Rubinstein also had boasted a solid computer background; and unlike some of the new people in software, he wasn’t just a businessman cashing in on an exploding market. Again and again a pattern was beginning to repeat itself. Programmer-entrepreneurs would tough it out in the proverbial garages—for some reason programmers work in garages, authors in garrets—and score with the right software hit. Propelled by little more than their drive and technical expertise, their companies would grow. Then, however, other businessmen, real businessmen, would want the same niche, and the marketing people would muscle in and set the tone. Or, as with some new companies, they might have been setting the tone from the very start. This had been the classic pattern in many industries—Orville and Wilbur Wright hadn’t exactly gone on to become major aviation magnates—but computers were improving faster than had airplanes. And so the process was accelerated; well-financed managers were rapidly replacing garage-style entrepreneurs. The stakes were higher, and striking back, software authors were even hiring agents. The question arose, however, of the extent to which the market would remain open to more imaginative garage people, anyway, what with increased use of teams to develop complex programs. “The frontier,” said Jeffrey Tarter, publisher of _Soft.letter_, an industry publication, “is already closing. “A couple of years ago you got to be successful primarily by competently executing an innovative idea and by picking the right machine to produce that execution for. VisiCalc for the Apple is the classic example here, but lots of other programs achieved success on a smaller scale by doing something useful for a microcomputer that came to dominate a market niche”—or, I would add with WordStar in mind, by producing a program valuable for its very ability to run on a number of machines. “Now, however,” Tarter said, “the rules are changing.... Marketing factors are becoming more important. You have to package and distribute the product with far greater sophistication than before and be able to spend the kind of money that sophistication requires.” “It’s like the record business,” said Nick Vergis, then a marketing man with Perfect Software, telling me about the new programs his company was developing. “You get a lot more bullets ready than you actually fire. Some will be hits, and some won’t. You hope you’ll get enough hits to pay for the new bullets.” Research and development (R & D) was a major part of the costs of new programs. The original WordStar had come cheaply; Rob Barnaby had toiled night and day for a fraction of the money that his counterparts now often demanded. Then again, advertising and other non-R & D expenditures in the industry had increased, too. By spring 1984 Select had sold 50,000 copies. That should have been enough to sustain a small or medium-sized software company, but even after a public stock offering in November 1983, Dean still felt capital-short. “We just couldn’t spend enough on ads and still have money to pay the sales force,” said Dean, who “saw it coming” by February 1984. That summer he licensed Select to Intelligent Systems to publish and promote at the retail level. Intelligent, privately held and based in Georgia, enjoyed yearly sales of $90 million; its Quadram subsidiary made well-advertised computer accessories. In late 1984 Select merged with Summa Software Corp., an Oregon firm that offered a stock-market program called Winning on Wall Street, and Dean laid off six marketing people from Select, so that his original firm had only twenty-one workers left. The Intelligent deal went on despite the merger. “There are many more products available today than the market can support, and it’s very confusing to consumers,” said an Intelligent vice-president named Frank Marks. “The user needs to know that he’s buying from a company that will be around in the future.” He was right. In that sense, the large companies’ growing ascendancy in software may have been to the benefit of the consumer. Still, old micro hands may have gnashed their teeth when they heard that Intelligence would turn Select into the “Quadsoft” line of software and when Marks said that the name “leverages Quadram’s brand awareness.” Quadsoft might as well have been a new shampoo.[25] Footnote 25: The account of Select’s capital shortage and the metamorphosis into Quadsoft comes from _InfoWorld_, August 13, 1984. The merger information is from _InfoWorld_, October 8, 1984. To Select Information Systems’ credit, the company had garnered some favorable reviews of new products in the months before the Quadsoft deal. (They included Select Write, a $99 stripped-down Select.) Even so, some of the old-time micro people correctly questioned Dean’s style of “user friendliness.” In a _Byte_ article, “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify,” Dean had pushed =menu-driven= software like Select.[26] The idea seemed logical. You’d see the choices on the computer screen rather than having to recall combinations of keystrokes, as you would with =command-driven= systems. Dean likened a computer menu to a restaurant menu. He lampooned the idea of “a command-driven restaurant” in which, supposedly, you’d try “to remember what sort of sauce the veal came with last time and whether it was pepper or peppercorns that you liked in your green beans.” Footnote 26: Dean’s _Byte_ article appeared December 1983, p. 161. Wasn’t that stretching it, however? If you ate at the same restaurant day after day, couldn’t you order many kinds of meals without bothering to glance at a menu? How would you feel about a waitress who _insisted_ you see a menu even if the fare never changed? She would be pushy, wouldn’t she? All of a sudden “user friendliness” would be antiuser pushiness to those using a program regularly. Strictly menu-driven software should normally be just for occasional users, children, and adults wanting to be treated like children; and many if not most adults in the business world worked too often with words and numbers to let Select-style programs keep them in the infant stage. Granted, exceptions existed justifying this kind of software. A micro user who occasionally retrieved information from a mainframe, for instance, could take advantage of menus to guide him through complicated routines. What’s more, even WordStar employed a menu to handle installation procedures to match the program up with various computers and printers. But that was different from menus that slowed you during your regular work with the program. Some of the so-called command-driven programs, moreover—at least WordStar—actually did have the option of letting you keep a list of common commands on the screen if you wanted. Jerry Pournelle, a prominent computer columnist, growled back at the “user friendliness” crowd, saying that their software didn’t let ordinary people enjoy the full power of their machines. “It takes a little work to join the micro revolution,” he said, “but the rewards can be high.”[27] I agreed. You didn’t have to learn programming, but you owed it to yourself and your company to make good use of the best software for your job. A user named Alan Scharf had done exactly that—saving his firm $200,000 a year. Footnote 27: Jerry Pournelle’s rebuttal to Dean and others of the “user friendly” school appeared in _Popular Computing_, May 1984, p. 81. Backup: ◼ IV, On the Evolution of Software (And a “Perfecter and Perfecter” Program), page 310. 6 ❑ Three Software Stories: Motorcycles, Homes, and The $200,000-a-Year Disk Zzzzzz. I doze off reading lists of the right software for, say, beekeepers or chiropractors. So sorry; I won’t cover everyone’s programs. Besides, software is evolving. I hate Select now; I may love its future editions. And what about WordStar? Although 2000 offers many improvements over my beloved WordStar 3.3—and I may eventually convert to it—I don’t like all the changes. _So don’t think specific programs here. Think concepts._ _In fact, if possible, don’t even think computer concepts. Instead, think_ business. _Just how could the lessons of the three people in this chapter apply to_ yours? Ed Boland: Accounting Ed Boland helps run a motorcycle shop, but you’ll never find him roaring off on a bike, dodging myopic drivers. “I’ve got a wife and three kids,” he joked. “Scares the hell out of me.” It doesn’t matter. Boland, a graying, middle-aged accountant, is just as useful to Clinton Cycles as a top mechanic or a crack Suzuki salesman. Above all, a good controller obviously knows where the money is. He helps his employer avoid unneeded trips to the bank to borrow more. Clinton Cycles, in fact, borrows rarely. That’s one reason why, when U.S. motorcycle sales suffered the economic equivalent of a head-on crash, Clinton survived. The firm even expanded during the early 1980s. Also, years before, owner Don Smolinski had wisely diversified. Clinton Cycles was actually Clinton Cycle and Salvage, Inc., a miniconglomerate with three motorcycle stores and dealings in scrap metal. Sales exceeded several million a year. But size and complexity weren’t pure joy. Boland’s accounting software just couldn’t handle a holding company and five subsidiaries, not without costly customizing, and nearly a year after computerization, his feelings were still mixed. “I don’t regret the decision,” Boland said. But at the time he had spent thousands of dollars more than planned, and he told me, “There’s been a few times I would have thrown this computer out the door in a second.” His horror story—even if it eventually turns into a success tale, as it probably will—is instructive. He’s good. And he bought his software from a good store. Clinton Computers, in the same Maryland suburb, won top ratings in a consumer guide in the Washington, D.C., area. A software executive, moreover, an outspoken one critical of some other D.C. dealers, praised Clinton. So a bothersome issue arises. If a $3,800 accounting program doesn’t work out easily with good people selling and using it, what happens among mediocre people? And there is a second point here. Don’t expect even the best computer store to serve as your private consultant, intimately familiar with your business; not, at least, unless you’re buying a big mini or mainframe from the likes of IBM. A third point, too, comes through. Don’t computerize a multi-million-dollar business without a consultant—at least not if you’re running an extra-hairy program like an accounting one—unless you’re willing to talk and think computerese or at least take a training course. Accounting software, anyway, just isn’t simple and reliable enough yet. Any idiot can flick on a computer and stuff a floppy disk into a drive or crank up a hard disk; most of the time his hardware will work fine, but even the brightest of businessmen may need a consultant to unravel the mysteries of many programs—even “canned,” off-the-shelf accounting packages like the one that bedeviled Ed Boland. A blunt, tough-talking man, Boland himself is no moron. He holds a bachelors degree in accounting, and he’s worked for employers ranging from hospitals to restaurant chains, including one where he caught a chef on the take from a supplier. “Accounting is accounting,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s food or motorcycles. Life exists the same way.” Moreover, life is a series of ratios, of intertwining figures. That’s how Boland caught the chef. He knew that food costs were normally 20 percent of the company’s expenses; two months after the chef’s hiring, they were 23 percent, creeping up toward 27 percent, finally. The incident perhaps colored his attitude toward computerization. He would computerize, but not overdo it, not lose himself in tangential statistics, not hire extra clerks to key in data. “We carry more than seventy thousand new parts _numbers_ alone,” he said. “Seventy thousand different kinds of screws, bolts, nuts, fenders, rims.” But if he couldn’t track every single bolt, he at least could work with major numbers like sales figures for various categories. Normally, for instance, new bike sales and accessories sales went up and down together, and if one of the two had fallen off alone, you could bet that Boland would demand a reason. If nothing else, computers, by making past information available more quickly, could help him sniff out trouble. Computerizing, he saw a micro as one way to avoid greedy consultants and their expensive recommendations. “I’ve seen too many instances,” said Boland, “where businesses paid out $50,000, $60,000 to a consultant who spent six or seven months analyzing computer requirements. Then he’d recommend $50,000 or $150,000 worth of computer equipment.” Boland wanted the benefits of the bigger machines without the costs. His goal was to reach the point that a somewhat larger competitor in the D.C. area already had; the rival owned an IBM 34 system with a six-digit price. “He used to work for IBM fifteen or twenty years ago, before he went into the motorcycle business,” Boland said. “He now has just about every one of his salespeople on commission, and he knows exactly what they sell every day. He can tell you where each motorcycle, each piece of inventory, is. “He can tell you whether it’s in a truck, what color it is, where it is, what stage of preparation it’s in for delivery. He puts his purchases in the computer with an inventory program. The moment a salesman sells a cycle, the register itself deducts it from inventory. It’s a =point-of-sales= system. So theoretically, at the end of the day he knows exactly what he started the day with, what he sold, what he added to it, and what the bottom-line figure is. We’d love to get to that point. “The likelihood of this happening with us, though, is very low. I don’t know if all this detail is necessary. And our business is seasonal, and I don’t want too much cash tied up in the system. And what’s the sense of keeping instant track of every nut and bolt sold? But we’d love to get the major items in on computer. The motorcycles, for instance. They can easily sell for up to $6,000 apiece, so it’s worth it. “It’s a question of software. This competitor has spent more than $100,000 to develop specific software to get what he wants. Now if you’ve got $100,000 to throw away and want to hire a programmer full time at, say, 0,000 a year, that’s fine. Most companies like us can’t afford that.” So Boland bought several programs off the shelf from Clinton Computers, including Accounting Plus, which he began trying to use as an electronic general ledger. He ran it on a North Star computer with a 5-megabyte hard disk—a memory device capable of stashing away the equivalent of maybe 2,500 typed pages of information. The North Star system was just a way for him to get his feet wet in computing with a general-ledger program. Boland, though, would switch computers even sooner than expected. The system’s memory space wouldn’t suffice for the records of his miniconglomerate, and it wasn’t easily expandable. And he would have trouble getting the machine repaired as quickly as he needed. Clinton Computers, however good its service department, just could not respond fast enough to suit _his_ requirements. And the software seemed just as major a disappointment, what with the need for complicated customization. “The biggest problem I ran into at the store,” he said of the hardware and software, “was ‘We’re going to sell you a system that we think will do the job, but not necessarily so.’” Both the buyer and the seller, in this case, apparently lost the software gamble; they apparently came out on the wrong side of “necessarily.” Clinton Computers did not win, because it _isn’t_ a fly-by-night operation. Boland’s name had come to me from none other than Sue Grothoff, who’d sold him the software. She had enough confidence in herself and her store to offer Boland as the source of a “candid” story, and my respect remains, especially after having talked to another business customer, raving happy about her ability to understand his company’s software needs. Boland emphasized that Clinton wasn’t out to cheat him. “Sue is a very nice person.” And he liked the software expert there, too. “He knows how to change software, but you have one person trying to meet the needs of too many customers. He’s spread too thin. Clinton never gave him enough time to get the program running at my business. And we never could seem to get together to get the twelve hours of training they’ve promised me. To be frank, I think we spent the twelve hours trying to correct the problem I had rather than on training.” Giving Clinton Computer’s side, Grothoff said, “Because of changes that Ed wanted in the software, it took longer to adapt the program to meet his needs. And that used up the twelve hours.” Evidently, Boland and Grothoff stayed on good terms, because she later sold him a new Kaypro portable for home use. But with his big computer system at work, Boland—for one reason or another—seems to have suffered more than his share of woes. “Accounting Plus,” said Boland of the software he bought there, “is a very good program, but it was designed for one single company to be subdivided into departments. You could have six departments, everything from sales to used parts, and it will work beautifully. But it wouldn’t for what I wanted. It would not treat a motorcycle store, for instance, as a subdivision of a holding company. I could not pull off separate profit and loss statements or separate balance sheets.” Clinton Computers, to its credit, referred Boland to a consultant familiar with the =source code= of Accounting Plus—a part of the program that would enable it to be customized. The consultant took in Boland’s North Star computer system as a trade-in. He sold him a Delta microcomputer and TeleVideo terminal in return, along with a hard-disk system upgradable to 70 megabytes. With the software customization included, the cost came to $20,000, minus the $12,000 trade-in. The consultant, like Clinton Computers, didn’t know as much about accounting as Boland had hoped. But through sheer tenacity Boland at least got himself a halfway usable program. “I had the software changed,” he said, “so that instead of one company with departments in it, it now reads a holding company with subsidiary companies. The software was changed to print out separate balance sheets and separate income statements for me. “On the income-statement side this machine will ask me if I want a consolidated or individual by-page income statement. It will print out a holding company and then, in successive order, on each page, the income statement for each company. When I go to the balance sheet, it will ask me that same question. “If I tell it I want individuals and a consolidated by page, it won’t do it. I must ask it individually each time for company one, then company two, right down the line. I have to give the computer individual instructions to do that. “And that was the best my consultant could do to change the software. It got the job done, but not all the way. “I’ve since found out that for $400, not ,800, I could have bought an accounting package that would do exactly the same thing I wanted.” So why didn’t he buy it? “Why spend another $400 to delve into it further and then find out _it_ isn’t what you wanted?” Boland asked. “I think it’s stupid to spend money at this point. I have a system I know I can make work within certain limits. I’m still in the learning phase, and I’ll probably still be there for another year, for all I know.” I thought he was too patient. If his software system was a dog—perhaps not for everyone but for him—he should change it. Four hundred dollars was a pittance compared to Boland’s total investment of $20,000. Ideally, too, as he said himself, he would have gone to a consultant in the first place, not just any consultant but one familiar with accounting. And yet it’s understandable why he acted as he did. Why repeat the mistakes he’d seen at other companies? Why not frugality? Better to be out $20,000 than $50,000 or $100,000 after paying for a mini, a consultant, and the other trimmings. His computer wasn’t making or saving buckets of money for Clinton Cycle and Salvage as of early 1983; but it might in the future as he got his software under control and could, for instance, easily put salesmen on commission. He told me, moreover, that he would soon stop farming out the company payroll—up to seventy people—to a computer firm. He also was mastering an electronic spreadsheet. He did not plan an accounts receivable program, because Clinton Cycle collected quickly through checks and credit cards, but an accounts payable one was in the offing. “It’s going to give me the companies’ names, the payment terms, the volume I deal with them each month,” Boland said. “It will flag when the bills are due, and it will also generate checks.” He was also going to crank up a mailing-list program, using a list of all buyers of new bikes within the last three years—a sensible project, considering the market for accessories and repeat sales. Obviously, here, as in other applications, the more information built up on his hard disk, the more his machines would justify the $20,000 investment. The benefits of computerization for Edward Boland might not be immediately dramatic, but with his stick-to-itiveness, sooner or later they’d almost surely come. Boland’s battles with computers were to continue. When I caught up with him in spring 1984, he said he’d bought yet another computer system. Charlie Bowie: Data Base and Spreadsheet Remember the customer who was raving happy about his software—also bought from Sue Grothoff at Clinton Computers? That’s Charlie Bowie, who, when we first talked, was a vice-president of Washington Homes and manager of its Southern Division. He told me he expected two Zenith micros to save his company perhaps as much as $50,000 a year, maybe more. In just one month, in fact, his $5,000 computer had already saved the equivalent of thousands of dollars in executive man-hours. Even before he and I met, his assistant, behind his back, was singing praises of her boss and their new machine. “I wanted to learn word processing,” said Julie Grimes, a young, blond woman who could have been the secretary in the IBM commercials saying the advertised product was “a piece of cake” to master. Gazing at the Zenith—which she and Bowie use for data-base work, spreadsheets, and some word processing—she said: “It really comes in handy.... We were both worried. Charlie told me, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll teach each other.’” Bowie by now was in the room, and it was immediately clear he’d won her respect through his brains and dedication, not through the normal trappings of executivedom. He was bearded. He wore a sweater and heavy boots and wire-rimmed glasses. He plainly was the construction industry’s version of the proverbial shirt-sleeves manager. He must loathe paperwork, prefer the field to the executive suite, even if he was a vice-president of a publicly owned real estate company with twelve hundred stockholders. He was in his mid-thirties. That wasn’t so much younger than Ed Boland, who himself, interviewed on a Saturday, had worn casual clothes. And yet the two somehow came across as being on opposite sides of the generation gap that all the pundits were babbling about during Vietnam. I could imagine Boland watching _M*A*S*H_; I could imagine Bowie, in the right setting, being a mild version of Hawkeye. He wouldn’t necessarily do things the traditional way, but in the end no one would care, because whatever it was, he’d succeed. Ed Boland was a man with a fondness for constants—a characteristic that in his profession had served him well. Charlie Bowie, I sensed, enjoyed surprises and change. Bowie’s company, like Boland’s, had to be good to have survived so long in a boom-and-bust industry. Everyone needs transportation, everyone needs housing; everyone does _not_ need recreational motorcycles or _new_ homes. Across the country, home sales had plummeted at the start of the 1980s. Washington Homes’ sales had been almost $30 million in 1980 but just half that two years later. Yet Bowie’s company had survived the ups and downs since 1965. The management philosophy struck me as the same as Clinton Cycles—the lean, mean school. It was early 1983 when we first talked. Another housing boom seemed ready to explode, and Bowie was working a sixty-five-hour week, “because we’ve gotten very busy, very quickly, and we haven’t built up our staff rapidly. It’s hard to find qualified people, and we don’t know whether the recovery’s here to stay.” Small wonder that he welcomed his computer as a sort of financial radar—an early warning system that would buzz before the bombs fell. Washington Homes was a general contractor. In other words, it was just as much in the management and budget business as the building business. Bowie and his company didn’t hire laborers, didn’t buy every nail and brick. Rather, they farmed out the construction to subcontractors, some of whom, if not policed, could wreak havoc on Washington Homes by, say, finishing work late. You can’t do plumbing and the electrical wiring, normally, if the walls aren’t up yet. You’ve got to keep your invisible assembly line moving. The sixty phases on Bowie’s “House budget summary” started with items like “Engineering” and “Water Sewer Charge,” continued through “Brick Veneer” and “Siding” and went on to such details as “Fences” and “Trash Removal.” If Bowie was late in submitting bids or getting what he paid for, it wasn’t a bureaucratic abstraction. It meant a late house, an unhappy customer, perhaps, and above all, more interest to pay the bank on Washington Homes’ construction loans. Bowie, moreover, had to keep track of his customer’s own financing arrangements. The company’s houses sold for anywhere from $55,000 to $135,000, but most customers were first timers who had never before wended their ways through the mortgage maze. Bowie could reduce his company’s carrying charges if he didn’t rush homes to completion before the customers were ready for them. “We don’t make any money until we deliver the house,” he said, “so we need to keep track of the time between when people contract and make application with a lender and how long it takes for them to win loan approval. “When our company had ninety or a hundred houses and was backlogged, it was fairly easy to do manually. But now we have almost five hundred houses in our backlog.” Shopping around for a system to handle all those grubby details, Bowie found that computer stores didn’t treat their first-time buyers as well as he wanted to treat his. “I looked at computers for a year,” he said, “and the biggest thing I found was the condescending attitude of the people in the sales centers to someone who knows nothing about it. “I’d walk into a store and give them a written list of my requirements, and the first thing they’d tell me was ‘Your requirements are wrong.’ And that was the case until I got to Clinton Computers.” Bowie showed Sue Grothoff, the sales rep, his sixty-phase budget sheet—a basic common-sense rule of software and hardware shopping. If you’re working with documents, at least nonconfidential ones, then _show_ them! Do so to a store. Do so to a consultant if you have one. Explain as clearly as you can just what kind of paperwork you’re computerizing. Here, incidentally, you can’t compare Bowie and Boland in an apple-to-apple way. Accounting programs can be much trickier than data bases and spreadsheets, especially for companies with unusual circumstances like Boland’s—that is, all those subsidiaries in a small-to-medium business. It’s clear, though, that whatever happened, Grothoff and Bowie communicated much better than she and Boland. “At this point,” said Bowie, “I was only interested in loan processing and budgets, and the main thing I was interested in was budgets.” He thought he needed above all an electronic spreadsheet. Here, however, for once, a computer sales rep knew his needs better than he did. Grothoff persuaded him that most of all he needed a =data-base= program—one that would help him track loans on hundreds of houses. It would store information and rearrange it in patterns he needed. He might not want full copies of all loan-processing reports, for example. Instead, he might want just the names of the home buyers, say, or just the foundation costs of each house. Or he might want the program to tote up all the foundation costs or perform other arithmetic, including complicated multiplication and division or calculation of ratios and percentages. And with a program like dBASE II that’s possible. Like many of its rivals, it will do some complex calculations, not just shuffle facts around. There are many books on dBASE II—yet another advantage and indication of its popularity. (Two good choices are _dBASE II User’s Guide_ by Adam B. Green and _Everyman’s Database Primer featuring dBASE II_ by Robert Byers.) Here are some ways in which dBASE II might organize your records if you’re an executive like Bowie: