September 30, 1990

LAST WEEK I attended the annual Agenda conference, sponsored by industry analyst Stewart Alsop and his P.C. Letter newsletter, and as a result I don’t feel really good about the fate, at least near-term, for the PC industry.

Most industry executives attending the conference believe that a lagging economy has already slowed their sales and is going to have a significant future impact on sales of personal computers. Surveys taken on-site tallied them as saying that 71 percent of them expect business conditions will get worse in the next 12 months.

But money worries are far from this industry’s only problem.

What was abundantly clear is that many PC executives, despite their yearly coming-together — ostensibly to talk about what’s really going on in their worlds — appear to be much more interested in proclaiming “mine’s bigger than yours” across a public address system than they are in listening to the tiny voices of the people who actually use their products.

For my money, some of the most salient points made by Agenda presenters were by those who, unlike most of the other speakers, were actual users of the technology that other attendees created.

One was Sheldon Laube, national director of information and technology for Price Waterhouse, who gave the audience a hearty dressing-down about how its product development procedures are an accident waiting to happen. They focus too much time on esoteric issues of operating systems and the like, and far too little time on those pesky little details such as making sure the computers keep working and the software doesn’t bomb every couple of hours.

Price Waterhouse is heavily invested in groupware, computer software that’s designed to run on a local area network and optimizes communication and cooperation between work groups. As increasing numbers of users begin to rely on such electronic networks as their primary means of communication, Laube says companies have to realize that users are no longer engineers who consider it a challenge to rebuild a crashed hard disk. When an entire business relies on having a network in full operation, having to reboot a computer or a server even once a day — definitely right there in the “everyday occurrence” category for those who work on these systems — is absolutely unacceptable.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but let’s just say that Laube wasn’t exactly swamped after his presentation by eager product managers wanting to hear more about how they could fix these problems.

The same kind reception greeted Donald Norman, professor and chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UC-San Diego. Some of you may recognize Norman’s name as the author of an excellent book, “The Psychology of Everyday Things,” an exploration of “user interfaces” in the world of appliances and machinery.

While three Microsoft Corp. executives — Chairman Bill Gates, vice president of application software Mike Maples, and senior VP of system software Steve Ballmer — looked on, Norman walked us through one of the funniest and most pathetic product demos I’ve ever seen, of a very popular product called Microsoft Works.

All Norman wanted to do was create a simple bar chart and pie chart. Suffice it to say that the process was far from simple. Everyone in the audience was laughing, and you knew it was laughing at Microsoft. What a dreadful mistake. Norman himself made it abundantly clear that Microsoft was light-years away from being the only company with this problem. Instead of sniggering, the audience should have been taking copious notes. Of course, they weren’t. Norman wasn’t swamped after his presentation, either.

Outside one session, I was chatting with Douglas Adams, famous for his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” books in the big world, and famous in the PC world as a technology buff. He said he found it “appalling” how little PC executives seem to know or care about their customers, despite all the leaps forward in user interface design touted by leading manufacturers. Maybe they ought to get the message. Maybe the recession isn’t the only reason people aren’t spending their hard-earned dough on computers.