February 5, 1989

REGIS IN THE NEWS, PART ONE: Last week rumors were flying that high-tech PR veteran Regis McKenna was resigning from his position as a venture capitalist and cracking the layoff whip at his namesake firm.

But McKenna, who has a part-time position at San Francisco venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says he is not abandoning the firm. He is likely, however, to be spending more time at his Palo Alto PR firm, Regis McKenna Inc. “The intention was not for me to leave RMI, (since) that’s where I see opportunities for investment,” McKenna says. John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, confirms this. “Regis is not leaving, ” he says.

Regis Himself, as his card proclaims, has good reason to turn his attention to his home base. Insiders say RMI’s recent move to fancy new Palo Alto digs together with heavy overhead costs caused financial hemorrhage.

“In all honesty, we haven’t made a decision to do anything yet” regarding layoffs, McKenna says. But “the same trends that are occuring with most of our clients” are happening at RMI, he says. “We work for a lot of companies like Apple, Xerox and Digital Equipment who are looking at being more austere,” McKenna says. “We think maybe we should be too, so we’re looking at the situation now instead of waiting until it’s too late.”

REGIS, PART TWO: During due diligence on the above item, I found that McKenna is keeping busy in other areas as well ˆ raising money for abused and abandoned children. He and wife Dianne McKenna, a Santa Clara County supervisor, are hitting up high-tech firms for $7 million to build The New Children’s Center of Santa Clara County. The County of Santa Clara is putting up $6 million, and McKenna has involved people such as Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Vinod Khosla and his wife, Neeru.

“Dianne (first) got involved at the Children’s Center of Santa Clara County,” McKenna says. “Three or four thousand kids a year in Silicon Valley end up at that shelter, children who must be rescued from their homes and put in temporary custody.” The home was built 25 years ago to shelter 40 kids a day. McKenna says it now houses 90 to 100 kids a day and the children stay anywhere from a few days to months.

“These are 2 and 3-year old tots who have been raped or abused,” McKenna says. “It’s a very hard trip to walk through there.” To speed the project, he resigned from other non-profit projects and became chairman of the board and its fund-raising committee.
THAT’S GRATITUDE FOR YA: Software developers are rumbling about the high price of writing software for Steve Jobs’ slick black cube, the Next Computer System. Everyone thinks the machine is swell, but some developers are miffed that Jobs is demanding such high bets on his company’s success.

The Next machine has no floppy disk drive, so some developers are avoiding Jobs until they know how he intends for them to distribute their software. Some are calling it the Nintendo strategy ˆ forcing them to sell their programs via his (relatively) expensive optical cartridge. Others are also amazed that Next charges them full price to buy the machine and its unfinished operating system. The cheapest package deal is $8,500. Add $2,000 for a laser printer, and $750 per person to attend a four-day “developer camp” at the San Jose Fairmont. The most expensive configuration, System D on the price list, is $15,500. Developers have to pay cash up front for the machines before they can attend “camp.”

“Jobs is nuts,” says one Apple Macintosh developer who refused to pay the price. He remembers the early days of Macintosh, where prototypes were either given to developers (before they’d passed FCC tests) or sold at 50 percent off. “To get in, you have to buy a machine? That is totally ass-backwards.”

“I guess if somebody’s a developer and they just have to have one, it could be worth it to them,” says a new Next developer. “But you’d think that if Next wants to encourage people to develop software, they could give them a better deal.”

SYSOPS UNITE: A new organization to represent the thousands of system operators who run electronic bulletin boards started last week. Called the North American Association of Bulletin Board System Operators (NAABBSO), the group will work on several fronts to represent “sysops” in the U.S. and Canada on matters ranging from FCC regulations to protection against harassment and infringement of First Amendment rights, says founder William Griffin of Roswell, Ga. Members’ boards must be legal, he says ˆ no pirate boards allowed.

“Everybody involved initially will be first an experienced bulletin board sysop,” Griffin says. “We have some key positions filled, but there are others.” For example, he says he is looking for people to chair online technical conferences, among other posts.

Griffin says he is also looking into insurance benefits for the group, as well as hardware and software discounts. NAABBSO can be contacted via modem at (203) 623-7727. It’s also accessible through PC Pursuit, but don’t ask me how, ask them.

SCREEN REFRESH: After a recent column item that John Seybold had been first to use WYSIWYG as computer terminology, the phone rang. Dave Liddle, chairman of Metaphor Computer Systems, called to say that Seybold was likely a pretender to the throne. He remembers that Metaphor’s VP of development, Charles Irby, coined the phrase during his stint at the historic Xerox PARC, where the first on-screen WYSIWYG ˆ(what you see is what you get) ˆwas conceived.

Write to Denise Caruso, Business Desk, San Francisco Examiner, P.O. Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120. Or contact her by computer using MCI Mail (Denise Caruso), CompuServe (73037,52) or MacNET (Caruso).