May 96 Dialog Box
Volume Number: 12
Issue Number: 5
Column Tag: Dialog Box
Dialog Box 
By Matt Neuburg, letters@mactech.com
If They Build It, Will Anyone Come?
We thought that readers might be interested in these excerpts from a thread that
occurred a while back (September, 1995) on the Apple internet providers mailing
list (subscription info
at http://www.solutions.apple.com/apple-internet/) between ZiyaOz@aol.com (Ziya
Oz) and jon@comvista.com (MacTech Magazine contributing editor Jon Wiederspan).
Obviously the details of the situation have changed in the meantime on many of these
products (please bear this in mind while reading!), but the point remains valid, the
more so since, as this issue went to press, Apple was actively soliciting internet
strategy advice from users.
Ziya: Are you bothered by the alarming absence of serious HTTP servers (as well as
site-management, clients/browsers and visual authoring tools) for the MacOS?
I’ve just begun to compile a list of all significant servers, clients and tools
available for Windows NT and Unix, but not for the Mac. The objective is, first,
to document the severity of the situation (so that perhaps Apple can put it on its
radar screen) and, second, to pressure some of the companies that completely
ignore the Mac, to pay more attention to it.
PRODUCT CLIENT/Browser SERVER DEV TOOL
OpenUI Q4 95 No No
WebObjects/Next-OpenStep No No No
Netscape/LiveWire Yes No No
Verity Topic Agent/Server Soon? No No
ATT Interchange No No No
Microsoft Network/Blackbird No No No
Hyper-G Soon? No No
Vermeer FrontPage Q1 96 No No
RAD PowerMedia Soon? No No
SapphireWeb No No No
ArchiText Yes No No
Sun Java Soon? NA Roaster
W3 Website Toolkit No No No
WebBase (ODBC) No No No
NaviSoft/NaviServer Yes No No
OpenMarket No No No
O’Reilly WebSite No No No
InContext Spider No No No
Microft Explorer No No No
Wollongong Emissary No No No
Jon: I’m a bit confused by the point of your list. Do you really mean that every
server that runs on another platform should also run on a Mac?
Ziya: This is not just about HTTP servers. It’s also about developer tools,
browsers, site managers, editors, etc. It’s really about what I called an alarming
trend on the Mac. Here’s what I mean:
At the last MacWorld Expo in Boston, I asked myself: If Ceneca was not formed by
ex-Taligent people, would they have developed Page/SiteMill for the MacOS
first? Would they even have developed for the Mac at all? After seeing at the
Fall Internet/Boston last week the preponderance of Windows NT and UNIX, and
the widespread neglect of the Mac, my answers are: No and No again.
By now it’s futile to cling to an unreasonable hope that the Mac’s role in
corporate “business” computing (databases, enterprise apps, servers, CAD,
network management, etc.) won’t become less and less consequential. Instead of
engaging in quasi-religious discourse on this, let’s move on. Is there a future for
the Mac in other areas? Certainly, in education, 3D, digital video, graphics,
DTP, interactive authoring and, I’d have thought, Internet.
I watched Spindler tell the audience at the launching of the PowerMacs that
“Apple would do Internet right.” Two years later, Apple has precious little to
show for it, with the possible exception of the promise (and no more) of
Cyberdog. How else could it be when (as I’m told by the OpenDoc evangelists)
there’s no person(s) in charge of Apple’s Internet strategy, product and
marketing? Of course Cyberdog is a great concept, but so were PowerTalk,
QuickDraw GX, GeoPort and a host of others Apple introduced in the recent past.
Is Internet important? A lot of people think so. Is it important, or even vital, to
Apple? How can you tell?
Internet is essentially a client/server architecture: browsers request and
servers serve data of some kind. Apple is not in the browser business; that’s
owned by Netscape (and soon to be shared by Microsoft). Cyberdog can’t really
change that in a 90% non-Mac marketplace. Well then, is Apple in the HTTP
server business? Not really. The only commercial HTTP server of any size is
WebStar. (InterServe, Web Server 4D, Netwings, etc., may change that. We’ll
see.)
It’s admittedly difficult to make a great and attractive server. When your share
of the OS market is 9%, though, you cannot afford not to be really great.
Currently, lack of true multitasking, multithreading, multihoming and myriad
file and bus I/O issues cripple the Mac against many others in the NT and UNIX
world. OpenTransport may alleviate some of these problems (and Copland
others), but NT and UNIX don’t have these problems now, and they sure won’t
remain stagnant either.
If you were a Windows user, say, two years ago and went to the Seybold show (for
the digital graphics, DTP and prepress industry), you were alienated and felt
virtually ignored. Sure, you had PageMaker and CorelDraw for Windows, but all
the exciting technology came out on the Mac and developers concentrated on its
advantages. Yet when I went through the Internet World last week, and stopped by
nearly 100 booths, the overwhelming majority of them made me (a Mac
developer) feel, well, irrelevant.
That to me means that those who develop for and profit from Internet are finding
the Mac not so relevant. I’ve also talked to countless “corporate” types who are
searching for tools to publish internal data and conduct commerce on a large
scale. Uniformly, they did not consider the Mac as a viable platform for the
server/backend operations. In the end, business people are pragmatic. If your
product does not offer demonstrable superiority, they’ll ignore it. (Mac is still
superior to Win 95, NT and UNIX in DTP and graphics, so it’s still favored.)
Since the Mac does not offer sufficient unambiguous advantage for the Internet,
unless something drastic happens soon, it will eventually be ignored.
When the browser used by 80% of Internet announces that it will not release its
servers, visual HTML editors or scripting tools for the Mac, you have to wonder
why and worry some. When a large number of people start developing with
Blackbird and you cannot even use it on the Mac, you don’t need to wonder but
you’ll have to worry a little.
If your business needs to access AT&T Interchange or Dow Jones Personal Journal
on-line, or conduct sophisticated commerce with an Open Market server, or
integrate your internal Oracle or Sybase databases with Web access via
object-oriented tools such as WebObjects, or if you want to serve disk- and
CD-ROM-based search engines like the Verity Topic Servers - well, you are out
of luck if you are a Mac shop.
And if the Mac is not a serious player at this early stage when tools are simpler,
what happens to more sophisticated Mac technologies like QuickDraw, QD 3D, QT
VR, etc., in terms of future acceptance? You think it’ll get any easier? When
increasingly more sophisticated plug-ins via Navigator talk to increasingly more
capable and varied servers that don’t and won’t, apparently, exist on the Mac,
how does that help the Mac user? If a developer of an HTTP browser or server
plug-in has the impression that there are only a few servers on the Mac and,
more importantly, throughput of the Mac servers is limited compared to, say, an
NT box costing about the same as a PowerMac, do you think he will worry too
much about that 9% Mac market share?
OpenDoc Solves the Wrong Problem
I’ve been worried about OpenDoc. My worry is that Apple and its allies are spending a
lot of time working on a technology which is ultimately going to turn out to be
irrelevant to users. A columnist in PC Magazine pointed out that compound-document
technologies seem oriented towards enhancing the applications of today, rather than
those of tomorrow. Then, last night, my misgivings crystallized at last, in a form that
I think I can explain coherently.
Consider a sheet of paper. Do I hear someone ask, “Do you mean a
word-processing sheet of paper, or a graphics sheet of paper?” Of course not! Stupid
question. A sheet of paper is a sheet of paper. Contrast this with the modality of most
current software: before you create a new document on your Mac, you must first decide
whether it’s going to be a word-processing document or a graphics document.
(ClarisWorks fans should not start smirking just yet.)
The essence of pre-OpenDoc software: an application is a mode. Remember, a
mode is a state which is not quite the one you want to be in to do what you want to do
next, and you have to consciously think about switching to the right state. Having
different states for your software is not evil in itself - the secret is to match them to
the problem at hand, and to make it as easy and natural as possible for the user to move
between states, without even thinking about it. When a state becomes restrictive and
unnatural to the problem at hand, then it becomes a mode.
Back to that sheet of paper. I pick up a pencil, and write some words in one part
(a word-processing part!), draw a table with some numbers in another part (a
spreadsheet part!) and put a graphic in another part (a graphics part!).
So far, so OpenDoc. Now, just for fun, I want to put a graphic into one of the table
cells. Will OpenDoc allow me to do this - use the tools of one part to work on another
part? No it won’t. Whereas, on a sheet of paper, every tool (pencil, pen, charcoal,
eraser, paintbrush, typewriter, finger, whatever) works in some way on every part.
Hence, the essence of OpenDoc software: a part is a mode. Sure, a spreadsheet
part could allow embedding of other parts within its cells, but you can appreciate that
this only gets you a little closer to the modelessness of a sheet of paper.
So how should we approach the problem instead? The beauty of a sheet of paper
is not just the variety of ways in which you can make marks on it, but that these
different ways can interoperate - a mark made by a paintbrush can freely abut or even
overlap a mark made by a pencil, unlike OpenDoc, with its demarcation of the document
into parts. If you could make the granularity of parts fine enough, you might manage
it, but I don’t think the part idea is set up to deal efficiently with a page containing
hundreds of parts.
In short, the problem needs to be rethought in terms of the basic technology for
putting marks on the computer screen. In order to achieve true, paper-style
modelessness, different tools need to be able to operate on a common graphical
representation of their data.
OpenDoc is a step in the right direction, in the sense that building a very high
tower is a step towards getting into outer space - in short, it’s a step that I don’t think
is worth taking. I think the effort would be better expended on solving a larger chunk
of the problem, on the rockets that will take us closer to true modelessness.
Lawrence D’Oliveiro, ldo@waikato.ac.nz
