Managing Computers in Large Organizations

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Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations http://www.nap.edu/catalog/167.html About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. TRENDS IN PERSONAL COMPUTER SOFTWARE 29 not yet achieved the same degree of success in the marketplace. Two examples are Vision and Lisa; much is made of the hundreds of work-years that went into their development. This is a significant fact for us at Lotus because we worry about how as an organization we are going to depend less on the efforts of individual geniuses. It is also a concern from a buyer's standpoint. If I were a data processing manager thinking about making a multimillion-dollar commitment to personal computers in my company, it would be important to deal with software vendors that had a track record in the marketplace. At present this is an unsolved problem. To add fuel to the fire, the successful products I mentioned—1-2-3, dBase, Wordstar, and Visicalc—were all originally developed in assembly language. To my knowledge, the currently released versions still run in that language, which, for a number of reasons, gives much better performance. When you're dealing with limited resources performance in terms of speed and power is crucial, but such software is not very portable or responsive to the change in hardware environments. Successful commercial products for personal computers in a higher-level language, such as C or Pascal, have not yet been developed and in my view probably will not be accomplished with today's 16- bit technology. We will have to wait for 32-bit technology and go through our investigation again. In the 16-bit world you can make a better product—better in the sense of user acceptance—if you write it in assembly language. Portability and other assets are the trade-offs to make a product people will be happy with. Another peculiarity of these successful products is that they were not developed out of any clear sense of market need. That is almost heresy. In the case of 1-2-3, for example, we looked at what was coming and said, “Aha, 16- bit technology is much better than 8-bit. We can do some important things.” We looked at Visicalc and the other products and said, “It would be great if Visicalc had a graphing command in it.” That was our market research. This peculiar situation may stem from the fact that no one can be taught how to design a personal computer software product. It is possible to take courses, get degrees, go to seminars, and put together a huge bookshelf on how to write a compiler, how to do top-down structure systems design, and how to write transaction processing-oriented applications. There is training and a body of knowledge; there are experts and some well-recognized principles Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations http://www.nap.edu/catalog/167.html About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. TRENDS IN PERSONAL COMPUTER SOFTWARE 30 and practices. But none of these things tells you how to write a good productivity application for a personal computer. Writing such an application is an art as well as an exercise in trial and error; software designers are like medieval artisans. There is also a subjective and psychological element in the development of software products that please users. It involves recognizing what will feel right and what will work for the user. It's a big factor because end users are not programmers and are not necessarily comfortable with the technology. Thus, software design is not the structured, orderly, systematic, rational, and controllable process that one would like to present to potential investors in a company's software technology. I assume that the training and the development of a design methodology will come in time, but it will be a long process. I also know that more structured market research not only is possible but is already being done. In general, however, successful products still come about because someone has the germ of an idea and someone, either the same person or a different person, has the technological capability to begin working on that idea. They go off somewhere for six to nine months and come back with a product. That should make anyone nervous. For software companies such as Lotus or any of its competitors, long-term prospects depend on moving to another stage of development and implementation and even inspiration. We have a long way to go. Besides the strongly individual and unpredictable nature of software design and development thus far, two other characteristics of the industry make forecasting difficult. The first is that software companies do not control their own destinies. Major software products are hardware-driven, which today means IBM-driven. The area of micro-to-mainframe communications is a good example of the kind of problem that affects Lotus and many other software companies. The market need is obviously there. PCs have to be hooked up, and we can see many possible approaches. Local area networks are one. Once you have 5, 10, 50, or 100 PCs handing off floppy disks from one user to the other soon becomes tiresome. If these users were connected in a local area network, they could share files and do electronic mail. In fact, organizations are already asking for these capabilities. The software company, however, understandably wants to be cautious in implementing something that may have to be thrown out once IBM or another company announces something new. Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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