Welcome to the American desktop, circa 1993.
Behold a landscape increasingly filled with SVGA monitors displaying GUIs linked to LANs or WANs. Pick your way through connectivity and downsizing, through the maze of token-ring and ethernet cables linked into client-server systems.
In other words, brace yourself for an unprecedented torrent of network-babble at home and at the office.
In the last 18 months a number of forces have converged on the American business scene that are bringing massive changes to the personal-computing experience.
Experts such as Mark Primosigh at May & Speh Inc., a computer-serv-ices company in Downers Grove that helps clients set up networks, describe a workplace revolution. They say it will match the revolution of the mid-1980s, when the current generation of high-memory Macintoshes and PCs swept away the Apples and IBM PC XTs that first brought big-league computing power to the desktops of the world.
“The objective,” noted Primosigh, whose specialty is helping companies create client-server networks, “is to maximize the human, hardware and software resources.”
In a nutshell: A cost-conscious, post-recession, corporate America has seized upon the ability to decentralize office work to downsize its payrolls and costs.
And greasing the skids for this downsizing is a price war in the PC marketplace that broke out in June 1992, just as PC makers brought out a new and dramatically more power-ful generation of machines.
The result is a flood of hot, new PCs unlike any ever seen hitting a workplace where managers seize on bargain-basement machine prices to ramp up efficiency because that lets them ramp down payrolls and other costs.
These machines can run massively complex software programs that allow ever smaller numbers of workers to complete each day’s work.
Maybe.
Though downsizing advocates tend to boast that individual productivity is improved by the proliferation of desktop machines reaching smaller work forces at many companies, other observers are skeptical.
Experts such as Ed Bott, editor of PC/Computing magazine, refer to the “productivity paradox,” the theory that office productivity is stagnating even as large investments are made to distribute computers to individual desktops.
PC/Computing has started including in its software reviews a “usability rating” that attempts to quantify whether one program will let a user produce more than a competing version.
“People know they are labor-savers and they can’t live without them. But they’re frustrated by the difficulty of using them, the long learning curve, and their inability to be as productive with them as they had hoped,” said Bott when he introduced the usability-rating plan in July.
Meanwhile, the wonder machines they are working with come mainly in three flavors-Apple Computer Inc.’s high-powered Macintoshes, with at least four megabytes of RAM (random access memory); the cheap new generation of IBM and clone PCs that use Intel Corp.’s 486 chip and have four or more megabytes of memory and hard drives with gigantic capacity; and advanced Unix-driven workstations and servers, where 16 megabytes of RAM is a base configuration.
These PCs, which have much higher capacities than the Intel 286 and 386 machines they replaced, make it possible to efficiently run a new brand of software based on GUIs (graphical user interfaces). And they do it in brilliant color with an SVGA (super video graphics adaptor) monitor.
These GUIs-including Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, IBM’s OS/2 and the Mac’s System 7-are dramatically different and vastly more powerful than what was state-of-the-art just a couple of years ago.
The software and hardware in question do far more than run word processors or the number-crunching spreadsheet and database platforms common on the computing scene.
The Software Publisher’s Association, based in Washington, announced Sept. 15 that, for the first time, GUI software titles outsold the more traditional text-based programs, usually referred to in the PC world as DOS programs.
GUI systems are dramatically different from the old DOS-based standbys such as Lotus’ 1-2-3, WordPerfect Corp.’s WordPerfect and Digital Communications Associates’ Crosstalk that have become office staples. GUIs allow users to send commands by moving a mouse rather than typing. This can alter the experience of using software.
For example, when using a spreadsheet such as 1-2-3 for Windows or Borland Internatonal Inc.’s new Quattro-Pro 5.0 you no longer have to write formulas based on row and column designations such as “A1:D48.”
Now, you move the mouse over the cells you want to select and “paint” them. If all you want is a total, click on an icon and the arithmetic is performed instantly. Other functions, such as averaging, percentages and amortizations, can be selected from menus, thus saving you from typing in complex arithmetic.
These GUI machines often are linked by cables and networking software such as Novell Inc.’s Netware, Lotus Development Corp.’s Notes or Microsoft’s Workgroups for Windows. When that happens, workers suddenly are part of an entity called a network, and they enter a new and often confusing dimension.
In a network, each PC retains its stand-alone ability to run the old, familiar programs, even while it becomes a client to a similar machine called a server, which creates the network. Token-rings and ethernets are the two leading ways of connecting networks.
The server can route files, text, pictures, memos, etc., among all the machines. So, particularly in large networks, each desktop machine links into a universe of massive amounts of data that rivals or exceeds the capacities of the mainframe computers of yore.
If the network is at a single location it is a LAN (local area network). Several LANs can be connected via telephone or even satellite radio links into WANs (wide area networks).
A WAN can be as complex as the tens of thousands of machines linked together by the University of Illinois system or as simple as somebody calling the home office from a hotel room and hooking into the LAN using a laptop and telephone modem.
Laptops carry the same power as full-size desktops, just as desktop PCs carry much of the same powers as the big mainframe machines that ushered in the computer age.
Meanwhile, back at the office, networked computers handle everything from converting interoffice paper communication to electronic mail (e-mail) to making the morning coffee.
Microsoft, the software giant that owns a lion’s share of this new computer marketplace, recently announced plans to write a program that will allow networks to operate things such as postage meters, fax machines, copying machines and small appliances.
The more evangelical among computer advocates seize on the fact that the IBM, its clones and Apple’s machines can do far more than they commonly are seen doing.
For example, the new machines allow a process called object linking and embedding (OLE, pronounced like the cheer at bullfights) that allows desktop users to add far more things than just words and numbers to the documents they create.
Using programs such as Microsoft’s Video for Windows or Apple’s Quicktime, it is possible to place icons in a document that, when clicked with a mouse, will call up everything from movies to slide shows to animated charts and graphs.
“We used to think that we were on the leading edge of technology when we could import a chart from 1-2-3 into a word processor,” said Todd Drombrowski, sales manager of the word-processing division at Lotus Development Corp., a major producer of OLE-equipped spreadsheets, databases and word processors.
“Now I work in an office where you can put a movie of the CEO making a speech in a memo that gets broadcast to every division all across the world in real time. I keep my calendar in Lotus Organize and then I link it to our AmiPro (word processor) and print out a daily, weekly or monthly schedule with every appointment I have.”
And that’s just the start. By turn-ing data into linked objects, it is pos-sible to do such things as setting up budgets complete with animated gra-phics to illustrate various aspects and then have everything change throughout the budget every time you change a number.
Thus, if you have a letter written saying that sales will be $5 million this quarter and then realize it should be $3 million, you instantly can change every reference of $5 million to $3 million in each document: Change a number in a spreadsheet and numbers change in letters written to describe the spreadsheet. The pie charts and bar charts all change in lock step, greatly simplifying the amount of time-and the number of people-needed for revisions.
When office workers read glowing articles in computer magazines about wonders such as OLE adding television pictures to their word-processing files, a common reaction is to note that few of these miracles are reaching individual desktops.
Promoters of the complex new software, such as Microsoft Corp.’s Chairman William Gates, counter that three years ago people were doubting that Windows would become common-and now it dominates the computing scene.
Even as skepticism over OLE and other future miracles flourishes, office staffs get smaller as the result of present miracles-and the machines on desktops get larger, along with the stacks of complicated software manuals.
The phenomenon plays out everywhere from mom-and-pop stores to the biggest corporations. Often the smaller networks are created by people who break away from large corporate organizations after learning the lessons of downsizing on the job.
In suburban Deerfield, public relations specialist Erica Swerdlow recently resigned as an account executive at a public relations firm in Northbrook, set up a three-machine LAN in her basement and created EBS Public Relations Inc.
Swerdlow, who jumped on the downsizing wave to be closer to her preschool child, hired a full-time account executive, Barbara Adler, to seek clients. And her husband, Brian, quit a Loop office job to manage the books.
LINK Resources Inc., a New York company that tracks the computer scene for computer companies, stock analysts and other clients, estimated in June that 24.3 million Americans are self-employed, working out of their homes full time or part time. In many cases, they are consultants to companies where they once were full-time employees.
Another 7.6 million people with full-time corporate jobs do 100 percent of their work from home, using PCs, fax machines and modems to keep in touch with the home office, according to the LINK estimates.
“The computers make it just a snap to take your job out of the office and into your home,” Swerdlow said.
She hired a network consultant-called an “integrator”-who linked the computers by token-ring adapters using Novell Inc.’s Lantastic software.
WordPerfect software and a laser printer allow Swerdlow to create news releases, business proposals and other documents, complete with company logos and other professional trappings. A CD-ROM drive allows her to search for potential customers from databases of 600 megabytes carried on the same kind of discs that carry recorded music.
A single 600-megabyte CD-ROM can carry as much text as 100 Bibles or a major encyclopedia set.
Fax modems on the machines allow the company to send out hundreds of releases for clients, and sales-contact management software lets Swerdlow and her staff keep track of people they contact for billing purposes. Brian Swerdlow keeps the books on special accounting software.
On a far larger scale are the downsizing efforts of companies such as Chicago-based CNA, the country’s eighth-largest insurance provider.
This summer CNA announced that it had installed more than 5,500 new IBM PS/2s in LANs at more than 70 branch offices. By September, integrators involved in setting up that project were forecasting that this network would include more than 9,000 desktops.
The PCs, using Intel’s 486 chip, will allow CNA’s office denizens to run software designed by the company’s programmers as well as Microsoft’s Windows programs, thus introducing thousands of new users to leading-edge computing.
Numerous analysts rush to put a name on the changes raging across the country’s desktops. They talked first of downsizing because they were coming “down” from mainframe computers to small desktop machines. But when the new networks proved highly efficient in allowing companies to reduce staff, cut paperwork costs and realize other economies, the label stuck.
Now other buzzwords are whirling about: “re-engineering,” “rightsizing” even “decruiting.”
M.M. Stuckey, chief executive of Minneapolis-based Fourth Shift Inc., calls it “demassing,” the de facto breaking up of huge corporations into much more manageable small units. He is the author of “Demass: Transforming the Dinosaur Corporation” (Productivity Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
Stuckey noted that “of the 100 firms heading Fortune’s first list of America’s 500 biggest companies published in 1956, only 29 are still in the top 100 on the latest list published.”
He traces how those big, successful companies are like the giant lizards that some believe grew so large that they could no longer function-bodies so large that not enough food could pass through their mouths to keep them alive.
And so the dinosaurs were downsized to mammals, who now have reached the Computer Age.
