to do with concern for their customers' interests. Hence the name of my awards. I'll have to think of a good trophy; a bronzed 8-inch floppy
disk might be nice.
The Delayed Gratification Award
looked like a lock for Bill Gates with Windows 97, er, 98. But the competition was stiff in this category, and the winner is...Larry Ellison (Yes! He finally beat Bill at something!) for the Oracle NC. In March
1996
, we ran a picture of a prototype Oracle NC that Ellison had flown to Japan to unveil. It looked great, but it was a year and a half before anyone could buy one. Honorable mention to Computer Associates for Jasmine, the object-oriented database that yearns to be.
The George Santayana Award for Historical Farce
is no contest. Hands down, this award goes to Steve Jobs for killing the Mac-clone market. Let's see, if we prevent our customers from buying better products at lower prices, they'll flock to us, right? Commercials to the contrary, thinking differently at Apple owes nothing to Albert Einstein.
The AOL Customer Service Award
goes to...AOL, which showed the most AOL-like custo
mer service on the Internet by converting to a flat-rate plan without installing the needed infrastructure. To add insult to that injury, AOL slows down your Internet experience further with constant pitches for credit cards, products you don't need, and anything else it can think of.
As usual, Microsoft was a contender in this category, but we couldn't find anyone in customer service at MSN to actually give an award to. Next year, maybe.
Speaking of junk e-mail,
The Golden Spam Award
is already in the inbox at CyberPromotions. King of the broadcast bandits, it proved that you can never have too much bandwidth, but you can certainly do too little of worth with it.
While we're on the Internet, let's give
The Betamax/VHS Award
to modem makers U.S. Robotics and Rockwell and countless others for having two, count 'em two, 56-Kbps-modem technologies. Will there be one standard before we move on to digital subscriber line (DSL) or ISDN or something cooler? What's that? I'm getting tw
o different answers.
The Planned Obsolescence Award
goes to Microsoft for making Word 97 incompatible with virtually the entire world's collection of Word documents. What was Microsoft thinking? It's since patched Word 97 up in an effort to silence the howls of disgust from users. But style sheets are still incompatible and can cause machine-locking crashes (readers of this column will recall my previous woes -- this turned out to be the source).
The Microchannel Award has finally lost its home at IBM and moved to San Jose. In a fit of hubris, Intel decided that it's the only microprocessor supplier in the world (a monopoly's reach must exceed its grasp, or what's a heaven for?) and locked its product inside a little black box called a single-edge cartridge. It's my way or the I-Way, says Andy Grove. Only time will tell how much damage to the once-unified x86 architecture this will cause.
Was there any good news this year? Sure. Hats off to the Internet Engineering Task Forc
e (IETF) and everyone who kept the Internet running in a year in which it really took off. Unlike Apple, Novell conceded it was its own worst enemy and hired new management that's brought some fresh thinking to nearly everyone's network OS supplier. And a special hats off to the tens of thousands of developers who have taken
Java
and
ActiveX
by the horns and begun to do some impressive things, despite the hysteria on both sides of this technology.
Mark Schlack, Editor in Chief,
mschlack@bix.com
Reality Bytes
