February 4, 1990

EDUCATORS who know how much personal computers can help teach public school kids must feel a lot like prisoners at Alcatraz, gazing across a shark-filled bay at the city of San Francisco. They know enough to drool at the possibilities, but the cost of getting there is impossibly high.

Two well-known industry analysts –ˆ Stewart Alsop, editor of PC Letter in Redwood City, and Ruthann Quindlen, vice president at Alex. Brown & Sons in San Francisco –ˆ are trying to build a bridge. It’s called “The Foundation for Educational Software, Inc.,” a Redwood City-based non-profit corporation which Alsop says is modeled after the McArthur Foundation.

“There’s no good curriculum-based software,” says Alsop. Because of poor public funding for education, good software for schools is “commercially not viable, companies can’t get started and make money.” So, he says, the Foundation will solicit funds from people and corporations in the PC industry, and use that money to hire the industry’s best programmers to develop educational software ˆ then give it away to the schools.

The genesis of the idea, says Alsop, was in 1988 when he and David Grady, now at Next, Inc., started The Grady Report, a newsletter for the educational computing community.

“The way we thought it would work was to start the newsletter,” says Alsop. “David’s idea was that once successful, we could give back to the (educational) community by starting a foundation, whose fundamental idea was to find a way to make software that the schools weren’t getting, and get it to them.”

Alsop says the only commitment for programmers is to take themselves out of the commercial world for a while, and to actually write the software.

“The Foundation will make sure they don’t suffer any financial pain while they’re doing it,” says Alsop.

The project already has critical support from industry leaders such as Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development, Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and Philippe Kahn, chairman of Borland International. Steve Jobs, whose Next Inc. computer company is dedicated to the educational community, is also interested, as is IBM.

“Our concept is to have 10 pioneer supporters,”says Quindlen. “We don’t just want the richest, because some may choose to help in ways other than money ˆ for example, Bill would be really great at helping select developers, and Mitch is a visionary, philosophically in tune with what’s needed. Money is important, but it’s ancillary.”
Both founders think the timing is right for such an ambitious project.

“The PC industry is a little over 10 years old now,” says Alsop. “The entrepreneurs are beginning to grow up, get married and have children. The focus on educational issues is suddenly a lot sharper. Even people without kids are contemplating (education). The other thing is, people involved early on are cashing out. They have a lot of money and they want to give back some of what they’ve gotten ˆ partially to the education system, but also to the entrepreneurial culture that allowed them to thrive.”

And the PC software industry is thriving ˆ it’s a $45 billion business worldwide.

“There is a lot of cash around to do something good,” says Alsop. “It’s about time the PC business started contributing to society in other ways besides making great machines.”

SPEAKING OF CONTRIBUTIONS, John Sculley, Apple’s chairman, said during Wednesday’s shareholder meeting that 1990 will be “the year of management tightening down and implementation” (at which moment an Apple employee with a sense of humor clamped a heavy hand on my shoulder). There would be cost reductions, he said, “especially in the area of employee expenses . . . hard choices, ones we wish we didn’t have to make.”

Later Sculley told a curious shareholder that multimillion-dollar executive “golden parachutes” were “necessary” to attract the kind of execs Apple needed to be successful.

I say they knew the job was dangerous when they took it. Anyone who needs more financial security than $500,000 or so a year either doesn’t have much faith in their own skills, or much faith in the company. If I were a shareholder, either choice would make me nervous. If execs in a volatile industry want job security, they should get a job at the phone company ˆ and let their lucrative contracts pay for a marketing campaign or two.

Courtesy of MacWEEK (the tabloid that annoys Apple by routinely printing its secrets), Apple insiders are whispering that either Debi Coleman or Del Yocam, old-guard Apple staffers, may get tapped for president of Apple USA, a slot recently vacated by Allen Loren. This makes sense if it’s true that two old-guard directors, Al Eisenstat and Mike Markkula, engineered the latest reorg.

Coleman, former Apple CFO who returned from sabbatical to a less stressful position, was spotted after the meeting, making her exit out a back door. She literally ran away from a group of reporters. It’s too bad she’s shy. Coleman probably has one of the most interesting perspectives on the Life and Times of Apple Computer.