Crawford's Corner

Citation

Crawford, W. (1999), "Crawford's Corner", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 11. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916kab.001

Crawford's Corner

Perspective

When Competitors Aren't

Will bookstores replace public libraries? Oops: that was last year's question. This year's version is: Will the Internet replace libraries? Four years ago, at least for some Midwestern public libraries, the question was: Will information brokers replace public libraries? I'm sure that a quarter-century ago, some pundits were puzzling over the question, Will Sesame Street make children's librarians obsolete?

The answer in every case is simple enough. No, whatever you name is not likely to replace well-run libraries. That won't reassure those who prefer to worry about such matters, rather than finding ways to run their libraries better.

Let's look beyond the answers to the questions. Most "will x replace libraries" questions may be based on false assumptions. They presume that competition is always a zero-sum game; that's frequently not the case.

Slate vs. Salon: The False Dichotomy

The reality of the situation was pointed out by Michael, editor of the Web magazine Slate, in his 1 May 1999 "readme" (Slate's editorial):

Do we regard Salon as our competition? Yes and no. We are somewhat direct competition for advertising dollars, but for readership the question is more complicated. The real competition for any publication in any medium is the clock: there are only 24 hours in a day. Strangely, the least competitive rival claimant for those hours is likely to be a similar publication. Print magazines, which depend on direct mail for generating subscriptions, usually find that their best prospects are subscribers to magazines they most closely resemble. Harper's does best with the mailing list of the Atlantic Monthly, and so on. This isn't because people are persuaded to switch, but because someone who has already eaten a blueberry bagel is more likely to eat a strawberry bagel than the average person is to eat a fruit bagel of any sort.

In a fledgling medium, similar publications are even more interdependent since the viability of this sort of enterprise is unproved. The cold, hard fact is that we need Salon to prosper and vice versa.

Consider this commentary the next time you worry about a new bookstore opening up near your library. I'm going to use a neologism a bit later on, one that I'm not fond of ­ but it's a term that makes sense in this context. That word is "coopetition": a combination of cooperation and competition. Let it sink in while we go through some background on Slate and Salon.

Slate calls Salon "the only roughly comparable magazine on the Web" ­ which tells you that Slate considers itself a Web magazine. Slate (www.slate.com) was founded in 1996 by Microsoft, which hired Michael Kinsley away from the New Republic and provided enough money to pay good writers and build a workable Web site. Slate began as a free Web magazine, predominantly weekly but with new features added each day. It even had a facility to produce each week's issue as a print-ready Microsoft Word document. Slate is a "political-cultural" magazine, with lots of news-related commentary and a fair amount of cultural coverage. I began reading it when it first became available, and have followed its progress as an exemplar of online magazines. Slate attained substantial readership (for a political-cultural magazine) by early 1998, when Microsoft made it subscription-only. At $20 per year, Slate acquired only some 23,000 subscribers ­ and in early 1999, the magazine became free again (with reader forums reserved for subscribers).

Salon was founded by a group of staffers from the San Francisco Examiner, and at the time my cynical comment was that it was writing that wasn't good enough for San Francisco's third-rate afternoon paper. Be that as it may, Salon also set up shop as a free sort-of-weekly Web magazine of ideas, politics, and culture. In May 1999, Salon (now at www.salon.com, after they got a hairdresser to yield the domain name) refashioned itself as a Web portal ­ but it's still pretty much a weekly magazine with daily content changes.

There have been a number of other attempts at broad-based Web magazines with enough editorial content to be called "magazines," but most quickly foundered, particularly those that weren't related to print publications. At this point, as Kinsley notes, Slate and Salon are the only games in town ­ both about three-years old, both with similar purviews, and both with heavily overlapping readership.

The Predominance of Coopetition

The Slate-Salon situation is far from unique. Think about your own reading. If you subscribe to National Geographic Traveler, you're a likely candidate for Condé Nast Traveler as well. While Stereophile sometimes pokes fun at The Abso!ute Sound, those pokes wouldn't make sense if many Stereophile readers didn't also read TAS. I'm currently on the editorial board of both Information Technology and Libraries and Library Hi Tech, and it's always been my sense that the two journals work together to define a field, rather than competing directly for papers or readers.

Coopetition isn't limited to magazines and journals. Notice how most auto dealerships are located these days? They're clustered in auto malls ­ groups of competing dealers who deliberately locate together. That colocation isn't so they can beat each other to bloody pulps; it's a sensible approach to draw in people who are ready to buy cars. There are many other examples of coopetition. It's one of many confounding aspects of real-world capitalism, one that libraries need to keep in mind.

What happens when a major bookstore opens up across the street from a public library? The doomcryers will say that the bookstore is draining people away from the library, and that the library's doomed. Once in a while, when the library is woefully underfunded and badly run, they're right. Commonly, the reverse is true. When a good bookstore comes to town, library use increases ­ and physical proximity may increase that effect. That really shouldn't be surprising. Libraries and bookstores both appeal to people who read; putting two resources nearby encourages people to do more reading. People who buy books are likely to be heavy library users and supporters: they care about reading.

Building Bigger Pies

As an example of the classic win-win situation, consider the story of Sony, Philips, and the Compact Cassette (audiocassette). Philips developed the Compact Cassette in the late 1950s, as a simpler (if lower quality) alternative to reel-to-reel tape recording. Philips had full patent coverage for its design, and originally intended to license those patents to other companies for a modest fee, possibly two cents per cassette and a similarly trivial sum per recorder.

Sony met with Philips and, around 1960, convinced Philips to make the patents available without license fees. Sony also contributed their own patented system for automatically setting recording levels, beginning a pattern of cross-licensing that has served Sony and Philips well for decades since (including the two companies' development of Compact Disc).

Why would Philips agree to license its patents without direct compensation? Sony argued that Philips, on its own, could dominate a small field (primarily dictation equipment): Philips would have the biggest piece of a small pie. But if many companies were induced to produce recorders and tapes the pie could become much larger. Ten percent of a billion-dollar field is a lot more than 60 percent of a ten-million-dollar field.

In the short run, Philips probably lost a little revenue on the deal. In the long run, the decision was a good one. While the no-fee case was a special one, the basic concept has continued. You build a bigger pie by finding competitors, getting them involved in the new idea, and giving people lots of choices.

Searching for Win-Win Situations

Libraries and bookstores should always build one another's business. That's also true for most other so-called competitors of libraries. If you're convinced that your library should be the first place or the only place people go for something, you're setting yourself up for failure. Give people choices, make those choices desirable, and you'll get your share of a growing field.

Search for win-win situations. When community leaders suggest that someone else does "the library's job" better than the library, first make sure the leaders understand the range of jobs you really do. But it's not enough to explain the problem away; you should turn the problem into an opportunity. Your library can probably learn from the other agency ­ and the other agency (be it a business, a consultant, or a piece of the Web) can benefit from library ideas. With insight and creativity, it's likely that you can build a win-win situation, with both agencies coming out ahead.

Why waste energy worrying about competitors that don't actually threaten you? Make them part of the bigger picture, grow with them, and everyone benefits. When I looked at Salon the week after Michael's editorial, I paid attention to the advertising banners. One banner that popped up quite frequently was for a specific Web site: Slate.

PC Values: September 1999

The standard configuration includes 64MB SDRAM, 16x or faster CD-ROM, AGP graphics adapter with 8MB SGRAM, V.90 fax/modem or 10/100 Ethernet adapter, wavetable sound card, speakers, and a 15.6-16" (viewable measure) display. "Pluses" and "Minuses" are shown where applicable, along with hard disk size and software. While there was a candidate for a high-end system from second-tier vendors, it was not as good a value as the top-tier Gateway, so it's not listed. This is one of those interestingly complex months when best values among top-tier systems are spread across all three of the top direct-order vendors ­ and it's the first month that Pentium III-600 systems appear.

• •

  Top, Budget: Micron Millennia C400: Celeron-400, 13GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM. Extras: MS Office SBE. $1,389, VR 9.34 (+6% since 6/99, +18% since 3/99).

• •

  Top, Midrange: Dell Dimension XPS T600: Pentium III-600, 13.6GB HD. Pluses:128MB SDRAM, 16MB display RAM. Extras: MS Works Suite 99, Harmon-Kardon speakers. $1,899, VR 7.76 (+13% since 6/99, +10% since 3/99).

• •

  Top, Power: Gateway Performance 600XL: Pentium III-600, 27.3GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 18" display with 32MB display RAM, 6x DVD-ROM, both V.90 modem and network card. Extras: MS Office 2000 SBE, CD-RW drive, Boston Acoustics 3-part speaker system. $2,999, VR 6.98 (+6% since 6/99, +13% since 3/99).

• •

  Other, Budget: Boldata Xtreme 2400C-466: Celeron-466, 4.3GB HD. Minuses: 32MB SDRAM, 13.8" display with 4MB display RAM. $819, VR 9.42 (+4% since 6/99, +11% since 3/99).

• •

  Other, Midrange: Boldata Xtreme 6900XP-450: Pentium III-450, 20GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 18" display with 32MB display RAM, 6x DVD-ROM. $1,839, VR 8.90 (+11% since 6/99, +24% since 3/99).

• •

  Other, Power: Compaq Presario 5700T-600/3: Pentium III-600, 22GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 18" display with 32MB display RAM, 6x DVD-ROM, digital modem and home networking card. Extras: MS Office 2000 SBE, JBL speakers with subwoofer. $2,799, VR 6.83 (-4% since 6/99, +14% since 3/99).

Press Watch

"Future technology," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 12, pp. 100-48.

Here's another "the way things will be" feature, this one with ten small divisions. Some of it's sensible, some of it's a little far out ­ and once in a while, you get a real whiff of similar features from Popular Mechanics or Popular Science from a couple of decades ago. It's interesting reading, as long as you remember to think "Or not" after each wowie-zowie projection.

The ten sections? Computers will be more human. Networks will be ubiquitous. The Web will be smart. Little devices will think. Software will get smarter. The Internet economy will take over. You'll look at computers in a whole new way. Entertainment will be virtual. Your identity will be digital. And Moore's Law will continue to drive computing.

Well, yes ­ and no. An Office paper clip that really works: sure, fine. But another idea from MIT's notorious Media Labs involves "physiological sensors attached to your body and tiny cameras that record your facial expressions [and] let the computers monitor your reactions. Then an 'affective tutor' will adjust a program to react to your emotions." Personally, I don't plan to get quite that intimate with a PC, and I suspect you don't either. ("Your emotions are not responding. Press any key to wait, or press Ctl-Alt-Del to reset your personality.")

The "ubiquitous networks" section carries the strongest sense of déjà vu. "By the end of 2000" universal high-speed home access and home LANs will "calm down...and assume their places as part of the utility system." That's 18 months away as I write this: anyone want to place bets on that prediction? We're also told that driving will be easier because "radar-based adaptive cruise control will maintain a safe following distance" and "seeing-eye cameras and embedded roadway transponders will steer the car." I've heard those predictions for a couple of decades, one way or another; but then, society is now committed to spending so much on highways and other common goods that we'll finally get those transponders. Right?

"The Web will be smart" goes from silly to disturbing. "Web sites will know a lot more about you," so they can anticipate your information needs and "deliver the precise information you need" ­ before you even realize you need it. Sites will track what you tend to look at and offer it to you without your intervention. "We're going to move from a Web that has a lot of data to search through to one that brings the information we want directly to us." "We want" is a loaded term, given that the article talks about popularity ranking (and quietly omits paid rankings): but then, why would you want any "information" other than what's wanted by the majority of your peers?

Surprisingly for PC Magazine, the "little devices will think" section once again has the bizarro notion of "having your refrigerator order your milk online." You'll control all your household appliances by cell phone (unless they simply control one another) ­ once you replace all your appliances, of course. Just think of stoves, refrigerators, and dishwashers as having the same three-year ideal lifespan as a PC.

This is probably as level-headed a set of near-future commentary as you'll find. Much of it is probably nonsense, some of it is almost terrifying, but it's all a good read, as long as you don't assume it's all true.

Carlson, K. (1999), "Digital décor," FamilyPC, June/July, pp. 124-9.

This cluster of CD-ROM reviews considers "multimedia coffee table books" and concludes that "not all of them deserve a place in your living room." What's apparent here is that some of these CDs just aren't FamilyPC material: they're not aimed at families, or at least they shouldn't be.

Reviews include some of the lowest ratings I've ever seen in FamilyPC, including a 62 for Octavio's Benjamin Franklin: Experiments and Observations on Electricity and 69 for NTT America's Exploring Edo/Virtual Edo. But the first is a high-quality digital facsimile of the 1751 book ­ period. Lacking multimedia bells and whistles, it's just what one tester said: "great for someone doing research on Ben Franklin...[but] the application for the average home user is almost nil." That may also be true of the Edo disc, a free CD when they reviewed it. How many families really want to explore 17th-century Japan at any length?

Other discs did much better, with James Cameron's Titanic Explorer and National Geographic Maps (both multi-CD sets) both achieving Recommended status. Two art discs fell short: Masterworks from the Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art was too much like an actual museum visit for most kids, and One Hundred Treasures from the British Library "left testers wanting more." (All the discs in this group are ones I'd love to review, and most of them are more suitable for the audiences I write for...but none of the publishers have sent them. Such is life.)

"The FamilyPC 100," FamilyPC, June/July, pp. 67-80.

I'm rarely fond of "best of" roundups, but they're always interesting. Here, as always with FamilyPC, the emphasis is on products suitable for family use and there doesn't seem to be a "one best product" restriction. There's no point in summarizing the article. If you have children and use PCs as a family, you should probably subscribe to FamilyPC anyway (as should most public library children's sections); go back and take a look at this article if you didn't already read it. I must say that there were very few cases where my reaction to a choice was "Huh?"

Bass, S. (1999), "USB's fast and easy ­ no bones about it," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 7, p. 43.

One of the slowest rollouts in PC history is finally catching hold ­ and, according to Steve Bass, it's working very well. USB ports have been standard on most PCs for roughly 18 months and on all iMacs and G3 PowerPCs ­ but there haven't been many USB peripherals. It took Windows 98 to make USB work well on the Windows side; Bass says it really does. The promise is that you can attach and detach new USB devices while you're computer is running: that seems to work more often than not. This is good news indeed, particularly since you'll never run out of IRQs by attaching multiple USB devices: they all share a single interrupt.

Rothfeder, J. (1999), "The online con," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 7, pp. 129-36.

A good article on Web scams and frauds, but it may overstate the case at times. "Hackers steal, collect, and sell credit card numbers to 'crammers'" ­ but I have yet to hear of a single verified case where a credit card number used on a Secure Socket Layer transaction was stolen or misappropriated. (An acquaintance made an excellent comment about using credit cards when the transaction is not clearly SSL, as evidenced by the closed lock or key on the screen and "https:" in the address ­ "it tells you that the company doesn't understand business on the Web, so you should avoid them anyway.")

Indeed, when the writer gets to the details, he speaks of hackers "who prowl the Net for nonsecure and unencrypted sites where consumers have used their credit cards to buy things." Well, sure, just like thieves used to prowl through dumpsters looking for carbons from credit card transactions. In this case, the solution is easy: no SSL, no credit card. Apart from that little scare, it's a good article with some noteworthy scams. Incidentally, I have this little known .com that's just starting operations, if you'd be interested in getting in on the ground floor.

Cohen, A. (1999), "Shopping bots," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 13, p. 35.

This quick look evaluates five "shopping bots" ­ Web sites that offer to find the best prices for a given product. You always need to be a bit cautious about the independence of free Web commerce services, but in this case some conflicts are made clear right up front. Excite shopping, for example, just doesn't offer to shop for books or music: instead, it provides direct links to Amazon.com and Cdnow respectively.

The best shopping bot for the moment appears to be mySimon (www.mysimon.com). It searches an unusually large number of merchant sites, flags advertisers as such while including non-advertising sites, and offers unusually specific limits. For example, and uniquely among this set of sites, you can tell mySimon you only want a vinyl version of some sound recording: no cassettes or CDs desired. It's not perfect, but neither are any of the other sites.

The oddest may be WebMarket. Not only does it exclude some of the biggest online merchants, it uses a searching technology that seems either quaint or bizarre. The more information you enter, the less accurate your results.

Howard, B. (1999), "My perfect PC," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 13, p. 97.

Howard introduces the special "perfect PC" issue of PC Magazine (see below) by considering his own preferences. They're worth noting ­ there isn't a lot here that I'd disagree with. One item particularly stands out, and suggests that PC's editors may be getting a little uneasy about their service and reliability grading system. "The quality of PCs is so high today that I'd be happy with any vendor that earns Cs or above on our latest reader survey and average or above-average buy-again scores." Since it's possible to earn a C by having three above-average ratings and one marginally below-average rating, that's plausible. I'm following that advice, slightly modified, in choosing this year's "first-tier" PC vendors for "PC Values." (See later in this article.)

"The perfect PC for you," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 13, pp. 100-80.

This lengthy section includes six subsections for different kinds of users. In each case, the editors suggest the "perfect" configuration for either a desktop or notebook PC for such a user and describe strong and weak points of the major vendors in that category.

"Perfect" means "optimal right now," that is, in the summer of 1999. This year's perfect PC for a power user might be next year's fine choice for a starter system. Right now, the suggested configuration for a power user is a Pentium III-500, 128MB RAM, a 20GB hard disk, a hot graphics accelerator with 32MB display RAM, an 18"-visible display, cable or DSL modem, either a DVD-RAM (writable) drive or both a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW drive, a 3D sound card and three-piece surround-sound speaker set, and Windows NT 4.0 for the office or Windows 98 for home.

It's an interesting piece. There are little problems, to be sure. (One sidebar on removable media has per-megabyte prices that are so grotesquely wrong they can only have been an Excel accident or the like.) If you're considering new PCs, read the section, but don't take it all too literally. One interesting aspect of the section is the tables of largest PC vendors by category of PC. For portables, the big four are Toshiba, Compaq, Dell, and IBM, each with more than 10 percent of the market; Gateway is fifth, with 4 percent, while everyone else shares 41 percent. For corporate PCs, Compaq and Dell are tied for first place (each with 18 percent of the market), with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway following (with 9, 7, and 6 percent respectively). Among home users, Compaq has a slight lead over Gateway and Packard Bell NEC (14 percent to 13 percent for the next two), with HP and IBM having 9 and 6 percent respectively. (Apple and Dell are tied for sixth place with four percent each.) Finally, when it comes to PC servers, Compaq dominates with 35 percent of the market; Dell, HP, and IBM trail with 17, 15, and 11 percent.

The piece is backed by the annual reader survey results: see below.

Howard, B., Levy, J., and Mehta, M. (1999), "Service and reliability," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 13, pp. 183-236.

This section begins with reader survey ratings for desktop and notebook PCs ­ this year breaking out desktops into office and home use ­ and continues to rate printers, office software suites, and Internet service providers. It's a rigorous statistical survey, but the results are open to interpretation ­ particularly as PCs have improved in overall reliability.

As noted earlier, one of PC Magazine's most sensible columnists now says that "anything C or better" is good enough for him. I'm inclined to agree where PCs are concerned ­ and that's how I'll select this year's "first-tier" vendors for "PC Values," with a few caveats.

The survey asks a range of questions to yield scores for five categories: satisfaction with reliability, satisfaction with repair experience, satisfaction with technical support, whether the user would buy the same brand again, and whether the unit needed any form of repair over the past year. The final category is the trickiest: it's now fairly apparent that calling a direct vendor to help with system configuration counts as a repair.

The letter grade doesn't include the "buy again" category, although I regard that as the single most important evidence of a vendor's worth. Only the other four categories play into the grade. An "A" requires all above-average ratings; "B" requires a mix of better-than-average and average ratings (but any mix counts the same); "C" must be either all average or a mix of better-than-average and worse-than-average; "D" involves a mix of average and worse-than-average; and "E" means all four categories scored worse than average.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe that a vendor with one worse-than-average rating, three better-than-average ratings, and a sharply better-than-average "would buy again" rating is doing better than one with one better-than-average, three average, and a below-average "would buy again" ­ but that's not the way the grades work.

If you just want the top grades, that's easy enough. Dell, HP, and IBM earn As for office use; Dell and IBM get top grades for home use; and Dell, IBM, and Quantex get As overall for desktops. For notebooks, IBM and Sony get As.

There's a lot more to the story than that, and I can't really summarize here. My set of first-tier vendors uses the following criteria this time around:

A vendor must have at least 250 desktop responses from the survey (Dell had 3,029 and Gateway had 2,958), must have a better-than-average "buy again" score, and must have at least three other better-than-average scores. That measure includes Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, and Micron ­ and that's a fairly clear cutoff. You may note the company that's missing this time around: Compaq, which has dropped to an astonishing "D" in the scoring, with three worse-than-average service and reliability ratings and only one average rating. The wild card, in one way, is Gateway: its units did need slightly more frequent repair than the average, but it scored very high on every other measure, with the second-highest "buy again" rating. Maybe this year's survey answers my own question as to how Compaq, with its relatively inefficient business model, could build such incredibly cheap systems while maintaining high standards for support. The answer may simply be that they can't.

For other categories, the printer favorites continue to be HP and Epson, both with solid A ratings ­ remarkable for HP, since it's better than average across the board despite representing almost two-thirds of all responses. The software and ISP ratings are so complex and confusing that I can only refer you to the articles.

Dvorak, J. (1999), "The big lie," PC/Computing, Vol. 12 No. 8, p. 93.

Once in a while, John Dvorak is worth reading ­ and this is one of those times. He discusses a few of the current "off-base predictions" that he thinks are silly. Never mind that his list of previous "nonevents" includes some that I'm pretty sure Dvorak was touting as the Next Great Development.

His list includes some good candidates and a couple of cases where he doesn't understand the field. I tend to agree that telephones as Web browsers (with tiny little screens), power-line networking, and digital paper are improbable. I certainly agree that "convergence" is either meaningless or nonsense, and have been saying so for years. As for voice recognition, he says that it barely works and can't be made to work better. While I do believe that "perfect" voice recognition is fundamentally impossible in English (because of the nature of the language), most reports suggest that it's good enough already to be an enormous boon for those who really can't type well or at all.

Then there's RAID, the redundant array of inexpensive disks. "This was supposed to be the future of hard disk technology." And so it is, for very large storage requirements ­ despite the fact that all hard disks are now "inexpensive" in RAID terms. Very large hard disk systems now tend to be RAID systems, at least in many cases. It just isn't a desktop technology, and probably never will be because single disks are so large and so reliable.

All in all, a good one-page read. It might be fun to go back and see which of these developments Dvorak has promoted in the past, as well as which of the other nonevents (pen computing and push technology, for example) had the Dvorak Seal of Approval.

Product Watch

Avoiding Microsoft Office

So you say you can't stand Microsoft applications, but you're not quite ready for Linux or the Mac OS? You want to avoid Microsoft Office ­ but you want to get your work done. There are the two "competitive" office suites, Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 and Lotus SmartSuite Millennium, but those aren't your only choices.

PC Magazine for 8 June 1999 reviews three low-cost office suites (pp. 56-7): Ability Office, 602Pro PC Suite, and StarOffice 5.0 Personal Edition.

You may have heard of StarOffice: it's the office suite that's available free for Linux (and OS/2 and Solaris). There's also a free downloadable version for Windows ­ free for non-commercial use, that is. It's a 64MB download from www.stardivision.com, so plan to devote a few hours or find a high speed connection. (That's 64 million bytes, not bits: at the fastest typical rate for "56K" modems ­ 50,660 bits per second ­ you can figure on at least 11,000 seconds or three hours.) StarOffice offers surprisingly robust MS Office file compatibility (it can even read multisheet Excel workbooks and save them back in Excel 97 format). It's also quite complete, including a relational database and "surprisingly complete" presentation package, as well as word processing, scheduling, and a hybrid paint-and-draw module. The greatest weakness of StarOffice (other than issues of long-term survival) may be that it's somewhat Works-like: everything is tightly integrated into a central interface. StarOffice requires 140MB disk space and runs under Windows 95, 98, and NT.

The other options seem considerably weaker. Ability Office costs $70 ­ or you can buy the Database, Draw, or Spreadsheet module for $30 each, with the word processor thrown in along with any purchase. It's a small suite (8MB download from www.ability.com, 30MB disk space) with some compatibility problems. It won't consistently recognize Word 97 documents, it loses graphics in RTF files, you can only open a single sheet from a multisheet workbook, and Ability Database doesn't recognize Access forms and reports. Ability Draw is "more similar to Microsoft Paint than Adobe PhotoDeluxe." 602Pro PC Suite costs $50, requires even less space (25MB disk space, but a larger 13.7MB download from www.software602.com), and seems to offer reasonably good value. You don't get a database or presentation program; you do get mail-merge capability in the word processor, pretty good HTML support, full Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility, and a decent photo-editing program.

Ergo Force Keyboard

This may fall into the "Huh?" category ­ that is, it may be great, but I'm not sure I get it. Key Tronic has a new $25 keyboard with a completely standard 104-key Windows layout. No split keyboard, no fancy angles, nothing like the MS Natural Keyboard or more expensive ergonomic units.

Instead, the Ergo Force "revolutionizes typing comfort by varying the force required to press each key," according to the quick writeup in the July 1999 PC World. Supposedly, it takes about 55 grams to activate any key on a typical keyboard. On the Ergo Force, you need 55 grams for function keys, cursor keys, and the like; 45 grams for the top row and for letter keys that you'd normally strike with your first and second fingers (that is, ertyui and the comparable keys above and below), a mere 35 grams for letter keys that use your ring and little fingers (qwop and the like) ­ and, just to make it interesting, 65 grams for the Enter key and 80 grams for the bottom row (space bar, et al.) and NumLock keys. The number pad takes 45 grams, just like inner letters.

The reviewer "experienced a palpable improvement in typing comfort," but he's one of those who gets a lot of accidental spaces with regular keyboards. Experienced touch typists shouldn't have that problem. Are ring fingers naturally weaker than index fingers, and should it really be that much harder to get a space? Maybe. I'm intrigued, but certainly not convinced (either way) ­ and I'm so used to the Natural layout that I'm not a good candidate.

Really Cheap Printers

Psst. Want a color inkjet printer for $80? Brand new, too. Even has a brand name on it. How can you lose?

A quick review of two early $80 inkjets in the August 1999 PC World shows fairly well how you can lose. These printers are one-cartridge units: you can either have clear black text at a reasonable price, or you can have color highlights and expensive muddy black. That's a shame; by now, every inkjet should be a two-cartridge unit (one black, one tricolor).

Hewlett-Packard came up with a new brand to enter this bottom-feeding market. Apollo printers are "powered by HP inkjet technology," but it's HP technology from 1991, and the print quality and speed show it. Ditto the Canon BJC-1000: it uses 1992 technology and yields mediocre results, albeit a little better than the HP.

You can buy a decent two-cartridge printer for $150. It's worth the extra money.

Walkabout Quest

Here's a great idea. A $379 dictation device with a little tiny screen and mix of real and on-screen buttons. You record a brief memo, choose a recipient from an on-screen menu, slip the Quest into a cradle attached to your PC. Then, magic happens: the Quest sends the recipient an e-mail with a huge .WAV attachment containing your voice memo. Huge, as in 350K for a 20-second message.

You could pick up the phone and leave voice mail directly, or maybe turn that 20 seconds of speech into a 50-word text e-mail, but where's the fun in that? (More significantly, why would you need a new $379 gadget to do that?)

Even PC/Computing couldn't swallow this one. Their verdict: "an expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist."

Gateway Profile XL

Usually, the best reason to buy an LCD desktop display is that you don't have the desk space for a CRT. But you still have that beast of a PC either on the desk or under it ­ or do you? Gateway's Profile XL puts the rest of the PC into the display housing. That makes it seven inches thick instead of the four inches you'd expect for a typical 15" LCD, and 18 pounds instead of 12 ­ but it's still a lot sleeker and more compact than any desktop PC, including the iMac.

PC Magazine reviews the Profile XL in its August 1999 issue. It isn't a high-speed PC: with an AMD K6-2 CPU, you can expect a little more than half the speed of a Pentium-III/550. Otherwise, it's a respectable system. You get a 6.4GB hard disk, 4x DVD-ROM drive, 4MB display RAM to drive the screen at true-color depth. A V.90 modem is built-in, but so is a Fast Ethernet controller. The display's base has USB ports, jacks for external speakers (the display integrates small speakers), video-out and joystick ports. You also get two Type II PC Card slots for notebook-style peripherals. In essence, the Profile XL is a "desktop notebook" using notebook parts ­ but with a stand-mounted display and a separate full-size keyboard, it will be much more pleasant to use than a typical notebook. It's also cheaper than a comparable notebook: $2,199 in August. (Full disclosure: I directly own a small amount of Gateway stock, but only because my wife and I both like the company and its computers so much.)

Review Watch

Desktop Computers

Jacobi, J., and Brandt, A. (1999), "How low can they go?," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 7, pp. 114-24.

My usual grump about PC World roundups applies here as well. They say that they reviewed 21 budget systems (under $1,000, complete with at least 32MB RAM, 4GB hard disk, 24x CD-ROM drive, speakers, a modem or network card, and a 14"-viewable display). Unfortunately, they only discuss the ten they consider best ­ thus removing any opportunity for you to use your own preferences on the others. (They post brief reviews for others on their Web site.) Would that PC World abandoned their "x best" lockstep, but I've given up hoping for editorial miracles. Meanwhile, this is an interesting article with several sidebars.

These aren't bad systems, although I suspect most serious users would be well served by spending a little more. (So do they: a sidebar discusses the tradeoffs in upgrading RAM, hard disk, and monitor, and switching to a DVD-ROM drive.) Three name brands appear within the top ten: Dell, IBM, and Compaq (they didn't test Gateway and Micron systems, and the HP tested didn't make the top ten). Those aren't the two "best buys," however. Those honors go to the MidWest Micro Office MWO-400C and Quantex M400c. Both use 400MHz Celeron CPUs and come with 64MB RAM and 6GB hard disk. The Quantex even has a 16" display (although it isn't very good). Both cost just under $1,000.

One additional grump: one of the few major positive points about the IBM Aptiva E Series 240 is "name-brand security," repeated as "the famous logo" under "what's hot." It has the slowest hard disk in the industry (definitely not IBM) and runs slower than it should. Does the IBM brand still count for that much?

Displays and Graphics

Overton, R. (1999), "Light, slight, and stylish," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 8, pp. 179-86.

Another roundup of LCD displays, making some appropriate points but still biasing the discussion somewhat. They admit that most LCDs only look their best at the highest resolution ­ but don't mention just how bad most of them look at other resolutions. They seem to think that the average 16"-viewable CRT costs $450, making the $1,085 to $1,150 price of their two Best Buys a bit less extreme. Unless PC World has an unusually long editorial lead time, $450 is high for a 16" CRT; $300 seems about right as this is written (mid-July 1999).

Two Best Buys appear, the $1,085 Princeton DPP560 as a pure digital unit and the $1,149 Samsung SyncMaster 530TFT for connection to analog display cards. They do conclude by saying that "the prices of LCD monitors will have to drop further before they become a common sight at the office" ­ and they're headed up for the rest of this year. LCD displays are getting better and have important niche uses ­ but the CRT has a few good years left.

Polito, J. (1999), "The perfect picture," PC/Computing, Vol. 12 No. 7, pp. 186-98.

Setting aside PC/Computing's usual peculiarities, this is a fairly sensible commentary on the place of larger displays (18" and 20" viewable), and the ratings seem plausible once you set aside the "only one Best" nonsense. For most users (except graphic artists), there's really no business case for a 20" monster, and "monster" is the right word: these displays are huge and expensive. The payback for moving to an 18" display seems faster (if perhaps longer than their confident "64 days") and good 18" displays take up no more room than 16" units, although they do cost $200 to $400 more. I'm biased, of course: the Trinitron-based 18" display (on my home PC) that I'm staring at right now continues to be the best single investment I've ever made in computing comfort and pleasure.

Sony's $999 GDM-F400 gets the single five-star rating for 18" units, even though it's priced well above most competition. Other high-rated units (in alphabetic order) include Hitachi's $629 NSA-SuperScan 753, IBM's $699 P92, the remarkably cheap $399 KDS VS-19sn (which doesn't have great text quality), LG Electronics' $530 910SC, Mitsubishi's $799 Diamond Pro 900u, NEC's $799 MultiSync FP950, and Princeton Graphics' $569 AGX900. The IBM, NEC, and Princeton all use aperture-grill (Trinitron or Diamondtron) tubes, as do all Sony and Mitsubishi displays.

If you feel you need a bigger display, the top mark goes to Iiyama's $999 VisionMaster Pro 502, although Sony's $1,899 GDM-F500 Multiscan has a better picture. Other high-rated units include Eizo Nanao's $1,369 FlexScan T960, IBM's $1,199 P202, and Nokia's $1,459 445Xpro. All but the Nokia use aperture-grill tubes.

Portable Computers

Brown, B. (1999), "Hand-held PCs," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 14, pp. 148-51.

If you want a plausible keyboard on a portable computer but don't want much weight ­ and don't need much power ­ then a "hand-held" may be your best bet. (For the smallest PCs, see "Palm-size PCs" below.) This review covers nine Windows CE units varying widely in configuration, price, and quality. Before buying one of these lightweights, read this article and other reviews carefully; you might be better off with a "mininotebook." The Editors' Choice in this group is NEC's MobilePro 800 ($1,000), a 2.6-pound unit with a 9.4" 800 * 600 high-color display, 32MB RAM (plus 24MB ROM), internal modem, and slightly narrow 17.5mm-pitch keyboard. As with any Windows CE hand-held, you don't get a CD-ROM drive or hard disk ­ if you need those, look to something like the Toshiba Portégé (an Editors' Choice in the same issue: see Howard, B. below). It's only a couple of ounces heavier (2.8 pounds) and comes with a 6.2GB hard disk, 24× CD-ROM, 10.8" 800 * 600 LCD screen, and essentially normal-width keyboard. Of course, it's a lot more expensive ($1,900): you're paying a premium for that portability.

Brown, B. (1999), "Palm-size PCs," PC Magazine, Vol.18 No. 14, pp. 133-47.

This roundup, part of a massive "connect anywhere" feature, compares eight palm-size computers: three models of the 3Com Palm and five Windows CE computers. The individual writeups aren't quite as detailed as in most earlier PC Magazine reviews, but you still get enough information to see what would suit your own needs best. Editors' Choice goes to the Casio Cassiopeia E-100, a $500 Windows CE unit that (uniquely) offers 16-bit color on its 240×320 screen and also offers stereo audio through headphones.

Howard, B. (1999), "Notebook PCs," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 14, pp. 154-209.

This massive section includes five different categories of notebook computers: four "mini-notebooks," nine thin systems (under five pounds), 13 mainstream systems, 19 "desktop replacements," and nine value systems (typically $1,500 or less). With that many systems, there's no good way to summarize the findings. Editors' Choice for mini-notebooks is the Toshiba Portégé; IBM's ThinkPad 570 gets the nod among thin systems; the Dell Latitude CPt C400GT is the Editors' Choice for a mainstream system; both the Dell Inspiron 7000 A400LT and IBM ThinkPad 600E receive honors as desktop replacements; and NEC's VersaNote is the winning value system. If you're in the market, read the article; there are many other good choices, and this is the year's most complete roundup of portable PCs.

Printers

Brown, B. and Brown, M. (1999), "A new crop of printers," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 14, pp. 56-7.

This "mini-roundup" covers four new printers designed for homes and small offices. The $500 Epson Stylus Photo 1200 replaces the award-winning Stylus Photo EX and offers similar speed and superb photo printing, possibly justifying its relatively high price if you plan to print a lot of photos. Canon's $180 BJC-5100 offers particularly good text-printing speed because of its flexible ink cartridge system and offers very sharp text. While not the best choices for photos, it offers versatile paper handling and fast text printing at a very low speed. Neither of the other two printers (both from Lexmark) seem particularly remarkable.

Littman, D. (1999), "Blazing lasers," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 7, pp. 148-54.

Thirty monochrome laser printers, including nine new models ­ but, of course, they only offer any real information on the top five small-business/home models and top five corporate models, and even these get neither individual print samples nor individual discussion. Given the remarkably limited detail, it's still worth noting their Best Buys: the $299 Brother HL-1040 as a home printer (dark graphics, but it's fast and easy to use) and the $1,129 Lexmark Optra S 1855 for corporations (fast but expensive). Purely a data point; nowhere near as useful as reviews that let you make your own judgements.

Scanners

Stone, H. (1999), "Fast and frugal scanning," Computer Shopper, Vol. 19 No. 7, pp. 218-23.

Right off the bat, this six-scanner comparison makes one crucial point: CCD scanners deliver better output than CIS scanners. CIS scanners (using contact-image sensors) are the cheapest and most compact page scanners you can buy, some costing less than $100. These units (using charge-coupled devices, as do digital cameras) cost $122 to $174 and offer 600dpi optical resolution. They come from some of the biggest names in the scanning business: Acer, Agfa, HP, Microtek, Umax, and Visioneer. All run as USB peripherals, offering the easiest possible connection to Windows 98 computers, and all include image editing and OCR software; all but the Acer also include document management software.

Six pages of Computer Shopper (a tabloid-size magazine) equals more than eight pages of most PC magazines; there's quite a bit of detail in these reviews, including samples of scanned images. You can draw your own conclusions from the information provided. The Best Buy goes to Microtek's $127 ScanMaker X6 USB for low price, fast high-quality photo scans, good software, and (uniquely in this group) the option of adding a page feeder and transparency adapter.

The article identifies two noteworthy alternatives. Umax' $131 Astra 1220U makes sense if you're planning to scan a lot of photos from published sources: it does the best job of removing moiré patterns, which tend to occur in scanning screen-printed photos. Visioneer's $133 OneTouch 7600 USB is the most versatile unit for such special uses as faxing, copying, and document storage; it also includes first-rate OCR software.

Utility Software

Tessler, F. (1999), "Essential Mac tools," Macworld, August, pp. 74-81.

You really won't get the most out of any personal computer without a few utilities ­ no matter which platform you use. I've poked fun at some earlier Mac utility roundups, which specified a minimum collection of utilities costing half as much as a modest Windows computer. This roundup doesn't say "you must have this set," but it does offer a well-chosen set of 15 programs. They evaluated more than that, with other reviews available at Macworld Online.

The range is fairly broad, and there don't seem to be Mac equivalents for Mijenix Fix-It or Norton SystemWorks: broad-ranging utility toolkits. You need one program to defragment your disk, another to use RAM more effectively, a set of diagnostics, and so on. I continue to be bemused by the single five-mouse rating: Conflict Catcher, which really shouldn't be needed on an OS that supposedly just works.

"The fix is in: top Windows utilities," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 8, pp. 152-70.

When it comes to Windows utilities, particularly for Windows 98, one big issue is whether you need a third-party tool or whether Windows has acceptable internal tools. After all, Windows 98 includes intelligent disk defragmenting, plausible disk checking, good registry error-handling, very strong system information and diagnostics, an undelete capability, and a fine backup application.

This roundup addresses that issue head-on. It divides utilities into six categories, assigns each to a "utilities expert," and asks the expert to compare built-in utilities to the separate offerings. One unfortunate aspect of the categorization is that utility suites only get considered once, even though their components might be winners in specific categories.

The list of best buys may be a little misleading. Norton SystemWorks gets the nod over Fix-It Utilities as a suite for the simple reason that it includes CleanSweep, while Fix-It lacks an uninstaller. But, as they say, Fix-It comes with PowerDesk, the best file manager on the market and the Best Buy in that category. That may make Fix-It a better choice for some users ­ and the combination of Fix-It and CleanSweep costs $20 less than the combination of SystemWorks and PowerDesk.

If you buy either of those combinations, you're pretty much set. They say that WinZip 7 and PKZip tie as best buys for file compression ­ but for most of us, PowerDesk's built-in Zip/Unzip routines are more than sufficient. Similarly, although Quick View Plus and KeyView Pro 6.5 will both offer file viewing for much wider ranges of files, the well-integrated QuickView capabilities of Windows 98 and PowerDesk suffice for most people. CleanSweep gets the nod as best uninstaller (I wholeheartedly agree), and they don't bother with best buys for diagnostics or crash prevention. Windows 98 has fine internal diagnostics; both utility suites include crash "protection."

Finally, if you're a fanatic about protecting yourself from yourself, they recommend either Undo & Recover Toolbox 2 ($40) or GoBack ($70) for advanced undelete capabilities.

The Details

Crawford's Corner is written by Walt Crawford, an information architect at the Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG) Opinions herein do not reflect those of RLG or MCB University Press. Comments should be sent to wcc@notes.rlg.org CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs for review should be sent to Walt Crawford, 1631 Columbia Drive, Mountain View, CA 94040-3638; Windows only. Web site: http://home.att.net/~walt.crawford.