NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/comp/sys/atari/st/18937

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-26 | 15.4 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!olivea!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!ai-lab!case!dmb
From: [e-mail] (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: I am STILL not making this up, OK?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 22 Dec 92 07:22:14 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Lines: 300
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.ai.mit.edu

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (David Baggett) writes:
>>I'm not sure of what you're faulting me for here; I expressed amazement
>>that after reading the gory details of the visit you place the blame on us
>>instead of Atari (this is what I've written above),
>
>The fault, sir, is that given the context of the whole article, it should have
>been apparent to you (as it was to other readers) that I was NOT finding fault
>with you at this point.  You had misinterpreted the writing.  It is as though
>you have decided that anything which I might say in response to your writing is
>an attempt to find fault, criticize, or denigrate you.

Oh Jeez, lose the pseudo-polite "sir," will you?  Regardless of your
original intention, you're certainly "finding fault," "denigrating,"
and "criticizing" now, so why the semantic games?

You're not really going to suggest that anything you've said so far has
been *constructive* are you?  Your whole point seems to be to
illustrate why DC deserved to go bankrupt, and why my posting of the
SunnyVile event is somehow irresponsible.

You go on to place blame on us for this, that, and the other without
knowing the whole story, and then bitch at me for not giving you my
personal diary on the whole matter.  You don't know more than about 5%
of the facts here, and that's not going to change, and you're just
going to have to deal with it.

>The message says nothing about your failure to impress Atari.  It does say a
>thing or two about how I would have responded (and, indeed, have responded)
>in a similar situation.

Ah, so you were just speculating HYPOTHETICALLY.  You're back-pedaling.
The same guy who wrote

    What *I* would have done if *I* were meeting with Atari...

and has being vehemently defending Atari against all reason in every
related thread is NOW trying to suggest that he was in NOW WAY
criticizing DC or me.  Give me a break, you've been flaming my butt
off since this thread started!  (Not that I mind, but still.)

>It is entirely Double-Click's fault that GW did not make it to market, if, as
>you've said, the libraries were completed and all that remained to be done was
>to come up with a manual and market the thing.

Yes, and I have defended, and will continue to defend DC here because
I think your analysis is overly-simplistic and marred by the fact that
you have only a marginal knowledge of the facts involved.  (For example,
you have no real knowledge of how difficult it would be to market GW,
since you have no knowledge of how large or complex a system it is.)

>>Why should I be your personal secretary?
>
>Did I ask you to be my personal secretary?  No.  I asked for some COMPANY
>NAMES.  It takes as much time to type 'reply' as it does to type 'follow' in
>News software.  I wanted those names for a reason, which had nothing to do with
>any desire to show you up for a lying fool (which I don't believe you to be in
>the first place, so don't try to bring it up in a future post).

Well, I had put the magazine AWAY and didn't FEEL like dragging it out
again simply because you were too LAZY to get your own information by
walking to a bookstore.  As for your complaints about my insinutations,
you never mentioned that you wanted the numbers for any particular
reason, so I had no reason to suspect you weren't just going to use
them to check up on me.  (Which would be fine, but I wouldn't go to any
trouble to help you.)

Had you just told me you wanted the information because you were
looking to buy a PC, I might have had more sympathy.  At this point I
don't even know what page I was quoting from; I just picked a random
one that had cheap prices.  (Besides that, they're already out of date.)

YOU could just as easily have (R)eplied with a non-hostile email note
explaining why you wanted the info as well.  YOU could have read my
mind just as easily as I could have read yours.

>>What would that possibly have gained?
>
>Self-esteem.  Knowledge that you have higher standards than one of the sons of
>the owner of a computer manufacturing corporation.  A few hours to do something
>more constructive.

Actually I left that meeting with more self-esteem, not less.  "What
does not kill us makes us stronger."  Also, what better ego-booster
than knowing *intimately well* that you could single-handedly run a
computer company better than the half-dozen people who are now running it?

I HAVE the knowledge that I have higher standards than almost everyone
I met with there.  Walking out or not would not have changed this,
except that if I'd walked out I'd have felt like I'd actually let them
get under my skin.

A few hours?  I suppose I could have seen another movie.

>>Would we have made the cost of the trip back?
>
>No.  Then again, DID you make the cost of the trip back?  One of the hardest
>things about being in business is knowing when to cut your losses.

Don't you see?  Your suggestion would leave us worse off without
gaining us anything.  All things being equal, you shouldn't storm out
of a meeting.  That doesn't help your case later when you cry foul, for
one thing, and for another, why be a pain in the butt under any
circumstances?  It's never useful to be a hothead.

Walking out would have left zero chance of success.  Waiting it out
would still leave us with a possible "let's have you talk to some
other people here" option.  Or a, "Gee, I'm sorry they treated you
badly, why don't you come out and show your stuff to me personally
and I'll pay your way" reconciliation from one of the higher-ups.

You're equating the chance of those events with zero just because you
know they didn't happen.  But such things weren't really that
unlikely.  Had we walked out in a huff, we could have hardly expected
sympathy from the management.  (If you hadn't already guessed, Leonard
isn't management in anything other than ego.)

>Was a 'successful deal' one of the clearly held goals of this meeting?  From
>what you have written, it looks as though someone at Atari wrote to you saying
>"Hi.  I hear you've written something neat for game programmers?   Would you
>like to show us what you're doing?"  It's a great ego-booster, but hardly the
>sort of thing one where one expects a written contract at the end of the day.

Well, yes.  We did not go out there just to inflate our egos.  There
was explicit discussion of how GW might fit into the Falcon plan
beforehand.  They weren't about to go blabbing details about their top
secret machine until we demonstrated we were serious about their offer,
but there WAS some discussion.

>>We were entirely professional the whole time.  Once we realized that we
>>had no hope of striking some deal with Atari,
>
>See above.  I would imagine your realization of this occurred sometime within
>the first few minutes of the encounter -- say, immediately after Mr. Tramiel's
>quip about lawsuits...

Yeah, possibly, but what's your point?  That we SHOULD HAVE STROMED
OUT, right?  You're just wrong about that; that's simply not a
defensible position.  How can you talk about your business expertise
when you advocate such bullheaded behavior?

You ALWAYS try to save the deal.  You ALWAYS make concessions with the
"big guy" to save the deal.  You ALWAYS put up with crap from the "big
guy" to save the deal.  If you want to be successful in business, you
simply cannot care about your ego or moral superiority relative to the
other side.  Such things are irrelevant.

Only if terms have been discussed and you find the terms to be out of
your favor IN AN ABSOLUTE SENSE, and only when negotiation of the terms
with the people in charge seems fruitless , do you walk away.  In our
case, terms were discussed only vaguely.  No deal was considered.  We
were just told to leave (basically).  Walking away at any time would
have been premature.  Sam Tramiel could have walked in at any moment
and said, "What the hell is going on here?" and actually heard us
out.  It didn't happen, but it could have.  Had it happened, we
would have been able to continue in a positive direction.  Had we
followed your policy, we wouldn't have been able to do that.

>It is a simple task to hook up a
>Syquest drive, and to mount a C partition.  If you did not EXPRESSLY tell the
>technician that the C partition was blank, I do not pity you for the time and
>trouble Atari had getting the software up and running.

1) It's clear you don't pity us for anything.  Just thought we'd get that
   one out of the way early.

2) You're right, it is a simple task to hook up a Syquest drive.  One
   element of this task might be checking to see what's on the cart
   before abandoning all hope and cursing third party software.  I only
   had two partitions on there, for God's sake.

>It is NOT a 'simple
>task' when you fail to tell someone that you have a non-standard practice with
>regard to disk partitions.

A "non-standard practice with regard to disk partitions"?  Oh man, this
is like absurdist theatre!  I suppose I should have also made sure that
I followed "standard disk partition practice" and sized the partitions
according to the MILSPEC standard, instead of making C 9 megs and D 32.

This is totally bogus.  Why didn't they ask me about it?  Why did it
take them an hour to cobble together a cart drive system in the first
place, when we told them we were bringing a cartrdige?

>>Atari invited us to come out and show us GW.  We didn't ask them.
>
>Crucial bit of information here, missing from your earlier posts.  As I was
>reading your other posts, it was a case of Double-Click REQUESTING A MEETING
>WITH ATARI.

Well, you were reading wrong.  What can I tell you.  My middle name
is McAdams, too, but I left that out.

>>They weren't going to pay our way, but why would we refuse when they were
>>talking about the possibility of bundling GW with the Falcon?
>
>Another crucial bit of information here, missing from your earlier posts.

Yes, crucial, so why are you continuing to waste your time analysing a
situation you don't know any facts about?  Just because you're
*determined* to argue every negative thing I say about Atari, whether
or not you have to stretch reality to its most absurd limits to do it,
that's why.

Look, I don't CARE about Atari.  They comprise about .001% of my time
and attention now.  I do think that DC deserves better than what you
and the "free software vultures" are giving them, but beyond that you
can just merrily toast Atari's wonderfulness all you want.

>Then again, given the fact that Atari hasn't bundled any third-party software
>with the ST in the United States, and given the presumption that Atari is
>probably not going to bundle a compiler with the Falcon, are you sure
>Double-Click had a clear set of goals for this meeting?

See other message.  (Hint: MiNT)

>Right.  And since the origin of all of these threads dealt with the demise of
>Double-Click, and the 'poor victims of Atari Corporation' was the leading
>theme, it just goes to show that Double-Click was as responsible for their
>demise as Atari could possibly have been.

Now we're finally cutting through all your smoke screens and finding
the real purpose of this whole silly argument.  You think I said it was
Atari's fault DC died and you don't like that, because you don't like
me constantly blaming Atari for all my problems.

Well, why don't you argue that instead of telling me what I should and
shouldn't have done with a product you know nothing about in a situation
you know next to nothing about.

The fact is, Atari has done an enormous amount to contribute to the
lousy ST market in the US.  While they're not holding a smoking gun
next to DC's head, they have, simply put, frittered away the resources
and talent that once made them great.  Atari was a training company for
Jack's kids -- a toy for them to play with -- and now they've broken
it.  The thousands of people who have in myriad ways poured their
life's blood into supporting Atari machines -- from Mike Vederman to
Allan Pratt, from Jay Miner to David Small, from BobR to Ralph --
have every reason to feel betrayed.

I read Dave Small's Atari 8-bit column in Creative Computing; I
practically worshipped Atari for their technical wizardry and
creativity.  At one time Atari had ties to all corners of not only the
gaming industry, but to the computer science community as well.  Heck,
lots of people who have come through this place (the AI lab at MIT)
have worked there; at one point all three of Marvin Minsky's kids were
working there.

The point is that the current management has gone beyond all reasonable
limits of incompetence; they have done a worse than disgraceful job
over the past few years, and even Atari die-hards must, in their heart
of hearts, admit that.  And because of it all, the Mike Vederman's,
Allan Pratt's, and BobR's out there have either quit entirely or still
hang on for inexplicable reasons, bitter to the bitter end.

>We have only Double-Click Software to blame for the non-release of GW.  They
>could have put the product out there on the market long before the Falcon was
>officially announced.

Would it have been profitable?  Would it have been a viable product in
the dreadful market that Atari Corp. produced through its errors?  Given
the poor sales figures in the ST market, did DC even have the money to
market GW properly, get the manuals written and printed, etc.?  You have
no way of knowing.

>It is not the fault of David Baggett that GW isn't out there, but then
>again, it is not the fault of Atari Corporation either.  No one
>prohibited Double-Click from marketing GW when it was first available.

On the contrary, all three are to some extent to blame.  It would be
wonderful if we could pin it all on one or the other, but it just isn't
that simple.

A sinking ship takes everyone with it.  In that sense, Atari is very
much to blame.

The architects of a plan that is too grand for its audience have
themselves to blame for the plan's failure.  In that sense, Neil and I
overestimated what the market could bear; we made a system that was too
large, too powerful, too expensive, too difficult to support ... too
much for too few.  The market could support STOS.  It could not
necessarily support a GW.  (More simply put: were ST owners in 1991
and beyond willing to pay as much for a game development system as
they were for a compiler?)

A guest that overstays his welcome is later uninvited.  In that sense,
DC should have dropped the ST years ago, before the bad market drove
them to bankruptcy.  I know Mike.  He loved/s Atari computers through
and through.  Moving to the PC or Mac is/was very difficult because of
this.  But this emotional attachment to a dying machine impaired his
business judgement.  Now that I've seen it happen personally, I won't
make the same mistake.  You can support Atari for as long as you want,
but I don't need any more lessons on why Atari developers leave the
market.

Dave Baggett
--
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