Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 05/83 - checked

May 1983

I have a theory. I don't for one second suppose that it is truly original, but I would claim to be the first person that I know of to have written it down, in a book I once produced.

The theory goes along the following lines: people will not accept any new development, technology or product which they can see no immediate use for or benefit from. This will be despite the fact that other people (especially the people who have developed and/or are selling the product) can see perfectly well the advantages to be gained.

A good example of this theory in action is Viewdata. For those that are used to computers and computing, the use and manipulation of information and the need to gain access to vast amounts of it quickly and easily, the potential advantages of the technology are immediately apparent.

Disregarding any arguments about the specific technical capabilities of Viewdata as available in this country, it has been seen that marketing it purely as a 'product' has not worked. The majority of the general public - who were expected to jump at the chance of acquiring and using this new technological wonder - have however barely risen above their normal somnolent state to give it a cursory inspection and a judgement of 'Uh?'.

They have, in practice, seen little point in having vast gobs of information' available for which they could see no immediate or specific purpose. Only if they find an application specific to their own requirements, and only if the product - in this example Viewdata - solves that applications problem, will the product as a whole then be investigated.

The same can be said of personal computers - or more specifically personal computers for use in business, commerce and the professions. I have used before the phrase that the industry has been 'bought from' rather than having to 'sell to' the marketplace, and this situation is probably about to change. In the market sector relating to business and the professions, and especially those professionals that work within large company structures, the 'selling to' is now starting, and there are some suggestions that it will not be as easy for the manufacturers of personal computers to break into this business as it has been for them to create from nothing the personal computer market per se.

At first sight this may appear somewhat odd; for the personal computer has already proved to be a big hit in the small business sector and the professions. Certainly it is true that the majority of purchasers have had either a clear idea, or reasonable grounds to suspect they had an idea, of what they wanted to achieve. They were the users who were 'buying from' the industry.

There are many, many more users of the 'small business' type yet to move towards the computer, and that total is but a flea-bite to the potential sales that exist within the walls of the large companies - the multinationals and their kin. This is the market that needs to be 'sold to'.

The majority of users, either individually or collectively, do not 'know' what they want. Oh sure, they want a computer system that will help them with their job, if only they can actually work out what it is that they do. They also, perhaps, want one for status reasons. They have trouble, however, actually identifying what it is the computer will be doing for them. Though they would possibly like one, they are not sure that they need it, or why.

Most of the rest just won't want one. They will see a computer as a threat, or as a status machine that has no relevance to them. There will be only a few (no doubt the pre-converted that have bought the likes of a Sinclair, VIC, or Dragon) who will positively want one of these new-fangled thingies.

For many large companies it will be worse, for they have a need to maintain, above all, some coherence in their corporate structure. Adding a new technology into the workings of the administration, financial control and product development areas of a company is a subject they will see as needing to be tackled very slowly.

Some estimates suggest that it could be 20 years before what we in the industry blithely refer to as 'office automation' is a normal and accepted part of a company's organisational structure.

And 20 years is a long time for some companies that are happily pinning their colours to the office automation mast to wait for their ship to come in.

There is a question here, one that goes roughly along the lines of '20 years?'. The reason the answer could be 'yes' is in the theory at the beginning of this piece. Office automation is concept built on almost infinite variation of physical implementation, and it could be many years before clear, coherent and provably workable approaches to its implementation are developed. At present, nobody really wants office automation. They have nothing against it, they just don't understand it and therefore they see no real need to have it around.

The trouble is that many of the basic tools of office automation now exist and are being actively sold to customers. In certain applications they are already successful, particularly in the small business area where one computer is now sufficient to perform the majority of tasks required by a small company.

In larger companies they are also being successfully applied to defined applications such as word processing.

These are all just scratching the surface, however, for office automation in its fullest sense will require not just the tools but the infrastructure. It will also require the experience of failed automation attempts to provide the true definition of how, where and why it should be applied. At the moment, the industry is trying to sell farming equipment to a Bedouin. If he could learn that he could probably make a better living staying still and cultivating some land then he might buy all the farm equipment going. At the moment he sees no reason to stop being a nomad, thank you very much.

Even important elements of office automation infrastructure like local area networks fit into this picture. They are, indeed, somewhat like Viewdata - everyone feels sure that they are important because they provide rapid communications facilities, but what do you communicate? How do you use the great gobs of information generated and available?

Answer these questions, and the way to apply the technology should come as a natural by-product.

But without coherent answers, it becomes questionable as to whether any or all of the tools so far produced will have any relevance in the long term. For example, personal computers as we currently know and love them - 8 or 16-bit boxes oriented towards individual man-machine interaction via such painful objects as the keyboard - may prove to be entirely the wrong type of 'tool' on which to base office automation. What if it proves to be something as yet undefined, like a speech I/O terminal connected optically to a processor that itself uses optical logic based on arithmetic to the base 4, derived from the four primary colours? I don't know - maybe somebody is working on it.

What is currently true is that several companies are beginning to pin an enormous amount of faith on office automation becoming a big market, and becoming one very soon. That in itself is a considerable act of faith, but it could be seen as being compounded by another, that their products are the right ones for such a 'market'.

It has to be noted that one company in particular, Apple Computers, is aligning itself almost totally with the office automa tion market. Apple III and the revamped Apple IIe are office-oriented machines, and the new Lisa - a grand, if expensive, lady of considerable talents - greatly enhances and expands the company's product capa bility in that area.

It has, however, put a lot of expensive eggs into one, as yet fairly intangible, bas ket. There are those in the industry who feel that the basket is not actually there yet - or if it is it could prove to be the wrong shape to hold these particular eggs.

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