What part of "get your shit together"
don't you understand???

Call me patriarchal, but if I were co-founder and interim CEO of The Whole Computing World, my strategy for perfecting my domain would be a mind-bending combination of rich rewards and terrible punishments for industry players.

I begin now with a list of five capital technology offenses. These crimes against my beatific state are immediately punishable by a slow, gruesome death for the technology management and engineering teams I hold responsible. I also plan to have the CEOs killed off for good measure.

These crimes and punishments will, naturally, be offset by a generous program of rewards for those good, hard-working, hard-thinking folks who break with the tradition of mediocrity and strive for excellence.

1. Shipping any personal computer, desktop or laptop, that does not indicate clearly, by a screen display appearing at startup time, the necessary keystrokes for accessing the CMOS/BIOS/SETUP function.

Oh, if I could reclaim the countless hours I've spent scouring web pages and pounding keyboards in desperate search for that magic keystroke. F1? F2? F10? DEL? CTRL-ALT-S (a Packard Bell-Phoenix special)? CTRL-ALT-ESC? Any guesses, anyone?

Raising the dead with arcane magical incantations would be no harder.

The latest bit of fun was a three-year-old Compaq Presario which, contrary to what the Compaq tech support people told me, had a "soft" setup -- a software utility program to control the setup functions normally found in hardware.

Of course, this setup software wasn't anywhere to be found on the computer's hard disk -- it had probably been deemed unnecessary, and erased, by an unknowing user. Miraculously, I found the software on the Internet, using my own initiative. Compaq themselves didn't know the software existed, much less how to use it. Thankfully, it worked – this time.

But why not just a simple "Press DEL to Enter Setup" at startup time? Did Compaq’s engineers keep the setup "soft" because they were afraid they wouldn't get it right the first time?

It took me three hours to accomplish a simple task that should have taken three seconds -- and would have, on any ordinary system.

Why do people love Compaqs again?

2. Shipping any personal computer that uses non-standard drive rails or non-standard screws of any type, especially the infamous "Torx head" screws found on Apple Macintosh PowerBooks.

Here, we'd take care of most of the deadwood at Dell, Compaq, and Apple in one fell swoop - leaving room at the top for fresh, courageous young blood.

What in God's name is wrong with an ordinary slotted-head or Phillips screw? Did these guys work in Army procurement before coming to high-technology? Let’s keep the cost and frustration factors low by using industry-standard parts whenever possible.

The following item applies
specifically to Apple's Steve Jobs

3. A special category of punishment must be reserved for Steve Jobs: champion of the fascinatingly-inexplicable and indefensible idea that a personal computer without a floppy disk drive is somehow more useful or beneficial, or even interesting, than one with a floppy drive.

This must be Jobs’ latest twist on an equally flawed idea, demonstrated by his early Macintosh systems – the idea that a computer with a floppy drive but no hard disk is somehow more useful or beneficial than a hard-disk equipped model!

Not content with having his NeXT system clobbered by the marketplace (and by history), Jobs, God Bless Him, is going to go for it again with the diskless I-Mac (maybe "I" stands for "incapable of performing basic personal computing functions such as storing data on floppy disks").

Luckily, 3M and Mitsubishi are ready to step in and save his butt with that optional USB LS-120 SuperDrive. Is there an I-Mac Zip Drive on the horizon too? I hope so, for the users' sakes.

Really, Jobs should forget the LS-120, cut a nice deal with Iomega, and put a Zip inside every I-MAC -- just a Zip, no floppy -- along with translation software so the Zip could read and write PC files.

That's all anyone would ever need, even Mac users. Jobs would be seen as progressive by killing the floppy in favor of the Zip, instead of regressive for leaving off both.

It would be a great boost for the already-very-successful Zip, it would help finish off the LS-120 (a decent answer to a question nobody is asking), and it would make the I-Mac a damn sight more useful.

Oh, I forgot -- Jobs' punishment.

Instead of killing him, lets force him to work as Bill Gates' chauffeur. That should dampen his spirit a bit, until he gets a reality check about the need for local disk storage. Then he could move up to a job in the Microsoft Mail Room.

Not to worry, Steve. It would only be a temporary position, until a permanent mail room clerk could be found!

4. Failing to ship adequate product documentation -- user's manuals and the like – with each and every computer product that people are expected to use.

Until the marketing boys get the message -- and I suspect they'd get it pretty soon – scores of middle-management heads would be rolling in the streets of Silicon Valley. These heads would be accompanied by the torsos of bean-counters whom, I suspect, have had a part to play in this distressing "damn the documentation, full speed ahead!" movement.

Computer manuals are bad enough when written well; when nonexistent, or hobbled by the absence of an index, or plagued with some other critical shortcoming (including errata sheets, and errata sheets for the errata sheets), they are even worse.

5. Failing to make the company’s 800 telephone technical support number uniquely and distinctly visible within the product support literature.

Sometimes I think people never grow up, they just get old – children walking around in adult bodies, like some zombie movie.

Because, like a child who goes into hiding at bath time, it is faintly humorous to watch how well companies bury their telephone tech support phone numbers – this, in some vague and muddle-headed attempt to keep their support costs down, I suppose.

Companies like Symantec provide a nice long list of "pay for support" phone numbers; you have to ferret out the toll-free number (which is only good for 90 days; another complaint for another day).

Other companies will present you with all sorts of automated solutions (e-mail discussion groups, faxback services, recorded message lines) that rarely help; finding your way to a helpful human being is harder than solving "Myst" or "Riven," and far less enjoyable.

I have no problem with keeping costs down. I just think it is a subtle evasion of responsibility to make users hunt and hunt for hidden tech support numbers.

There is one good thing about overloaded tech support lines: it might, it just might, suggest to somebody somewhere that some further engineering, development, or human factors work was needed before the product was shipped.

IBM Gets A Blue Ribbon
for Easy Toll-Free
Tech Support

A special dispensation is due to IBM and their fabulous ThinkPad portable computers. Instead of hiding it, IBM includes two brightly-colored stickers with each system that can be affixed to the machine for easy reference to their 800 number -- and the excellent no-cost telephone technical support organization that lies behind it.

Of course, there may never be any real proof that heaven exists. Some people who claim to have glimpsed heaven find ample proof in that profound experience alone.

Based on this reasoning, The Computer Guru knows that computer heaven exists, because he has glimpsed it, too.

Right now, for example, I’m using Windows 98 and Microsoft Word 2000 to write this article on a new IBM ThinkPad equipped with 82MB of RAM and a fabulous active-matrix screen – a robust, easy-to-use, crash-free, elegant, affordable personal computing environment.

It may not be heaven, but hell – it ain’t bad.

THE END

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