Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 08/84 - checked

August 1984

One of industry's more adventurous pastimes is setting out from scratch to create a new market which it can then service with the new product it has just developed. It will invariably be a product that potential purchasers would not claim to need, until they saw one in action and decided to change their minds. For the companies that succeed in creating the new market, however, the excitement, rewards and potential for disaster can all be great.

Take Nascom, for example, a company that created, almost single-handedly, the market for cheap kit computers in this country with the launch of the Nascom 1 of blessed memory. It wasn't the first small kit micro onto the market, but it was the first cheap machine to have a real keyboard and Basic available in the price, compared to the toggle switches and machine code of its rivals.

The story is familiar. Nascom sold, at its launch in Wembley, as many machines as it thought might take nine months or more to sell, and sold them in just one morning. Demand outstripped supply, the latter being exacerbated by the fact that the design hadn't even been properly finished.

Sir Clive Sinclair then created the next market - the sub-£100 assembled micro - with the launch of the ZX80. To date, via the ZX81 and the Spectrum, he and his company have not looked back, and have not ducked the challenge of creating more new markets.

The Cambridge Mafia are still at it, aren't they? Earlier this year the QL was launched which, we were portentously informed, stood for 'Quantum Leap'.

With past attempts at creating new computer markets Sinclair has been conspicuously successful. So if the QL is not aimed at one of these existing market sectors, such as games machine or small business systems, then it is intended for some new market altogether. As the company has indicated that it intends this to be the case, what are its chances of success?

Just a cursory glance at the specification of the QL will show it falling easily between the two stools of games player and business machine - over specified for one and arguably under-specified for the other. The market at which it has been aimed is the new home/professional user. The trouble with this sector, from Sinclair's point of view, is that it is only new in practice.

It has been obvious for a couple of years that such a market would exist at some time. The trend in hardware pricing made it certain that the facilities would be available at an affordable price, while the trends in small computer utilisation pointed towards people looking to have processing facilities at home that were up to doing 'real' work.

The problems that face the QL, therefore, are more complex than the almost standard ones of late first deliveries and lashed-up first versions. If Sinclair had this market to itself these would be only a temporary hindrance to future fortunes, as they were with the ZX80, '81 and Spectrum.

Unfortunately for Sinclair, it is not the only contender for the favours of the home/professional user. Several other companies have either made a declaration or made announcements of intent, and the range of options available to the user is quite wide already. The QL must stand on its merits, rather than on the fact that it is the only contender in an area that no-one had thought of.

Some of the competition, most notably Amstrad and to a lesser degree Triumph Adler, is following a different route to the market from Sinclair, yet it is one that has, if anything, a slightly better chance of succeeding than the QL. That route involves one of the oldest, and occasionally most hated artifacts of the whole microcomputer scene - the CP/M operating system.

Now, this has been written off as obsolete and antiquated more times than anyone cares to remember. The trouble is, it won't lie down and die decently. Instead it keeps finding new markets, the latest being the home/ professional user. In an age when techno-flash is the accepted order of the day it may seem strange to find something so palpably 'old' maintaining such an influence in the market. It is its age, however, that may prove the key to its future success.

I am one of several million people sceptical of CP/M as a user-friendly operating system. What it does have, however, is straightforward clout in the market where it counts - applications software.

For many professional users, who perhaps work both at home and at an office, there will be the possibility of working with a small computer that uses the same environment as the one at work. With packages like BSTAM and a modem, the two systems could even communicate.

Boring and old technology they certainly are, but CP/M hardware and software is now pretty reliable and for the majority of users in this new home/professional market-place, that is going to be at least as important as new advances in technology or design.

Against this, the QL offers the promise of considerable processing power and an operating system that, when it is fully operational, will make CP/M look archaic. Unfortunately for Sinclair, as recent reports have indicated, such promise is still in the future.

The Microdrives are an interesting innovation but could prove a positive hindrance to the success of the machine. Unless Microdrives and cartridges are freely available to all software producers they will stay a non-standard medium, obliging software houses to consider carefully whether to invest in the QL market. Such investment will also be prejudiced by the new operating system, especially as it still seems to be incomplete. Without abundant applications software the QL could be beaten to the punch in this new market.

There have been the expected strong suggestions that the QL was launched in January as a pre-emptive strike against such as the Apple Macintosh, and that it should not have been launched until April at the earliest.

Only time and the market-place will tell whether the knife the company has thrown at the opposition will strike home, or turn into a boomerang. If it is the latter, it will be interesting to see if Sinclair can catch it, or duck in time.

end