[416] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
One small meta-flame and then I'll shut up -- promise
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Fri Mar 22 16:13:20 1991
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 91 15:55:23 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: com-priv@uu.psi.com
[really, lord forgive me but it is a trend...]
I find papers offered electronically in postscript format nearly
useless. I know from private correspondence where I mentioned this
others often feel the same ("oh yeah I grabbed it but it's postscript
and won't print", "yah, me too, maybe i'll play with it this
weekend...")
I have a postscript printer and postscript previewers, that's not the
problem. I will say that there's less than a 25% chance that any given
paper will display in a previewer, and about a 50/50 chance it will
print usefully on another's postscript printer (particularly if it
originated in some WYSIWYG system which often assumes all sorts of
prefix header is available.)
Even when they work I'm usually stuck with a handful of dead tree (the
previewers working so rarely, and being dreadfully slow, minutes per
page it feels like.)
I still can't search/index/store these postscript documents in any
useful form except as bags of bits under some hopefully memorable
file.name. Later looking for that paper that mentioned mumble's
policies on blahnet is futile (except to go print off everything again
or find it in the piles of paper and hand search.) It's medieval.
I would much prefer a poorly formatted ASCII dump (most word
processors offer these) at least as an alternative to a whiz-bang
postscript file.
And a cautionary tale...
I was speaking to someone in management at one well known (top-10)
mini-computer company who has over the last few years fallen on
horrible times. An in-depth analysis of their demise concluded that
perhaps the one most damaging error they made was allowing every
department to decide for themselves what PC's or workstations and
common utilities (spread-sheets, word-processors etc.) they would use,
in a show of "open-mindedness".
Apparently this led to most of the staff (of thousands) not getting
much else done on a typical day than wandering about the halls trying
to get a floppy read or a document printed or converted for inclusion
from one part of a project to another, etc. etc.
I've seen such corporate behavior myself, it has to be seen to be
believed, stand in the halls and ask people what they're up to and see
how many are trying to find XYZ's copy of WordKiller which can maybe
read this ABC floppy and write it back out in a format that their copy
of SlideSmudge will read back in for tomorrow's presentation...(and
how many resort to just printing it all out and typing it all back
in!)
The moral was that this one seemingly innocuous decision, early on,
may have led to the demise of the company as suddenly every little
project became more and more onerous on a day-to-day basis.
Give it to me dumb and simple, save me from wandering the hallways...
Enough.
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | uunet!world!bzs
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
