NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/comp/text/interlea/559

Internet Message Format | 1992-07-23 | 3.5 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Sean McLinden)
Newsgroups: comp.text.interleaf
Subject: Re: What kind of University support is this ?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Jul 92 03:36:25 GMT
Article-I.D.: andrew.MePdatu00WBOE151o8
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    <[e-mail]>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
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>It is too bad that many of the foreign subsidiaries take a more
>conservative view than the hq of the value university users can bring
>to the document processing community. This is ironic, since
>conventional wisdom is that American firms always take a short-term
>profit over long term benefit view, while non-American firms do the
>reverse. The AT&T Unix experience should be a lesson in regard
>supporting universities for the benefits which accrue many years
>later.
>
>
>Bob Morris
>Professor and
>Director, Digital Typography Research Group
>University of Massachusetts at Boston

Examples such as these have been used, before, to provide justifications for
industrial investment in academic programs but my experience is that they do
not always work. The AT&T Unix example works because Unix is affordable and
so people moving from academia to industry can afford to take their Unix
environments with them.

The same is *not* true for products such as Interleaf. What good does it do
me to do anything on a package that is going to be unaffordable in my real
world environment? Sure, I can learn a few new metaphors, but of what practical
example is it.

As a counter example to yours, recall that IBM used to give their system
developers access to the highest performance workstations and PCs (with the
idea that productivity would be better). The end result was a first release
of OS/2 that practically required a desktop mainframe to run it.

Technology is much different than it was when the IBMs and the DECs started
giving mainframes to Universities. Organizational computing no longer means
buying a mainframe and supporting timesharing. It now means coordinating the
rapid deployment of desktop personal productivity tools that give users a lot
of fingertip power but at a price: interoperability. The successful
organization
fights the interoperability issue by adopting standards for desktop computing
that can be institution-wide. This is the only way in which an institution
can afford the cost of maintaining users.

To look at it the another way, what we are dealing with is not a technology
model but a social model. University pricing emphasizes ubiquitous access to
technology. But commercial pricing shifts that emphasis to islands of
technology
leaving the PT Barnums of the world (Bill Gates and Microsoft) to pander to
the masses. The corporate social computing environment is much different than
the academic environment and much more financially restrictive.

With mainframes you had a different situation since whether you were an
industry or a university you still had, typically, one mainframe (or one
centralized MIS facility). With Unix, you had the opposite with respect
to economy of scale. The earliest academic Unix systems were Vax-based.
As we have evolved, personal Unix is more affordable than was the Unix
offered to universities which means more people can afford to have it.
Not true with Interleaf, most of the relational databases, and a whole lot
of other technologies.

Sean McLinden