September 11, 1988

UP FOR GRABS: Remember when the Public Utilities Commission slapped Pacific Bell with a $16.5 million bill as a penalty for its heavy-handed marketing practices? Foresighted telecom advocates had the PUC put the cash in a Ratepayers Education Trust. A couple days ago, a PUC committee in charge of the fund recommended that the California Community Foundation of Los Angeles be put in charge of spending the money.

Although the foundation is administrating the trust, who gets the money is ultimately up to the PUC’s disbursement committee. Early talk leaned toward spending first on preventing abusive practices from happening again — sending groups into ethnic communities to teach them where to take their complaints and concerns, etc.

PUC committee chair Rob Feraru has proposed an ambitious and logical next step. “We’d like to give the general body of ratepayers a taste of the issues facing regulators in the future,” says Feraru. “Issues of the network and how far it should be expanded, privacy controls — these are cutting-edge issues that regulators haven’t decided on yet.”
That means that We-the-Ratepayers might actually learn what’s going on, thank you very much, when Sacramento-types start messing with our lives via today’s convoluted telecom policies. The trust will begin soliciting proposals before year’s end.

JUST CHECKING: Since IBM/Microsoft gets so much negative publicity around its new graphical interfaces, I wasn’t surprised to find a new advocacy group called the Windows/Presentation Manager Association had formed.

It didn’t surprise me, either, to see that W/PMA’s founding board of directors included notables from Microsoft, Aldus Corp. and others.

But I was taken aback by the advisory board. Six of the 15 advisors are editors of major trade magazines, including PC Week, PC Tech Journal, PC World, PC Magazine, InfoWorld and Computer Reseller News. Four publish newsletters — including PC Letter, Release 1.0 and SoftLetter. And the others are big market research names that many reporters call on for unbiased information about companies, products and markets. Since the members of W/PMA are mostly vendors (i.e., editorial fodder and/or advertisers), does the advisors’ association with W/PMA present a conflict of interest?

“Not any more than when I tell anyone else what I think of them,” replies Stewart Alsop, editor of PC Letter. “I share my opinions with everybody.”

“I’m not convinced (it’s a conflict),” agrees Jonathan Sacks, editor-in-chief and associate publisher of InfoWorld. “These guys are going to come to us with questions about how we feel about things. If they said, ÔWhat can we do with Presentation Manager to kill Apple?’ and I answered that question honestly, I think that would be a conflict of interest. However, if the question is, ‘Do you think the Presentation Manager in its current form is any good and do you have any suggestions on how to improve it?’ — hell, I answer that question for companies every single day. It certainly would not affect our coverage.”

CATS IN BAGS: It seems Fujitsu Ltd. spoke too soon about its imminent deal to buy a bunch of mainframes from Amdahl Corp. in Sunnyvale. A wire service late last week reported that Fujitsu said the pilot program (to buy six mainframes now, more in March) was already in place. Amdahl’s immediate response was to say the deal hadn’t yet been signed, even though it’s widely known the pen is poised.

Why not let the cat out of the bag? One analyst says it’s because Amdahl “wanted to stop the street” (that’s Wall Street, folks) from thinking about it as a short-term way to make some money. The deal, says the analyst, is actually “extraordinarily significant” to Amdahl’s long-term strategy.