Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 08/85 - checked

November 1985

Just what does the home computer user really want?

Now, there's a question the like of which a large number of manufacturers and software producers would love to known the answer to. They have spent the last couple of years making a small (and sometimes not so small) fortune out of the home computer business, and now they are spending their time watching the gravy train grind inexorably to a halt.

The home market has been built on cheap hardware designed primarily, if not completely exclusively, for running video games applications. This has been where the customers' interests seem to have lain and so it has been entirely logical for the industry to bust a gut satisfying it.

It has also been fairly logical for the home computer to be a fad that would eventually pass in the night. God knows what makes some things a fad and others a long term market, but the games-playing home computer certainly seems to have gone the way of the hula hoop, at least for now.

So, what do the manufacturers of the systems and software do about it to keep their businesses from the clutches of the great liquidator in the sky?

Some seem to have simply prayed that the bad times would go away. Others have tried to move into different market areas where the competition is just as fierce. Not surprisingly, there is no simple solution. One area that many have looked at and dabbled with is the small business/professional market, which should still be able to support a goodly level of growth in business for the right products. Sinclair tried it with the QL, but seems to have fallen foul of being different for the sake of it. Despite the availability of the Psion application software for the machine, there has been little other software available for the system.

All the `serious' software, as I have pointed out before in this column, has been in the old CP/M catalogues. That is why machines such as the Amstrad, the Alphatronic PC, some of the MSX machines and the new Commodore 128 have interested me of late. These are all in the market of being expensive home computers, but really quite reasonably priced for small business machines.

More importantly they all, to greater or lesser extent, run the CP/M operating system, where many years-worth of applications software has accumulated.

Much of this stuff is rubbish, it has to be admitted. But a goodly proportion is the meat and drink of small business administration and management. The majority of the business applications packages which we all take for granted in the PC-clone market now, started life in the CP/M arena. Many have become standards in their own lifetimes.

WordStar is a classic example of this. Here is a package that has been around for literally years. It was one of the first CP/M packaged applications and it has been a big seller ever since. Now, everyone who has ever worked a variety of different word processor packages will know that WordStar is, well.... not the best package of its type now available on the market.

It is, however, the touchstone of personal computer word processing. What other packages on the market can generate such a degree of standardisation as to be refered to in job ads for copy typists : "WordStar Temp required for 3 weeks".This makes the package, and others like it, a natural target for the small business user as well as the home user with any interest in learning about other, more `real' applications of the computer than video games.

It also poses an interesting marketing conundrum for the companies which produce these packages. What price should they charge for them?

Those readers who have tracked this column over the years will know that I have normally tended towards the idea that prices should drift upwards rather than downwards, so that there is sufficient margin in the distributor/dealer pot to support end users properly.

The home market is one where I feel that the tendency can, and perhaps should, be the other way round, however.

For example, WordStar's producer, Micropro, has released a version of the package called Pocket WordStar, aimed at the new home/professional/small business market being created by machines like the Amstrad. Its main failing, it seems to me, is the price of £149. Why go to the trouble of producing a `special' version of something that has been around years running under exactly the same operating system that is now being used by the new owners.

It seemed to me that a better way of doing things would be to re-launch the original package that came out all those years ago. This would be giving Micropro what, in marketing terms, would be called a geriatric kicker to the package by generating revenue out of the version that was long dead and paid for. Virtually any margin over the cost of production and marketing of this original version would be pennies in the till.

On this basis, an end-user price of £50 or even less would be justifiable, economic to all and profitable to the producer. It would also help the prospective users to get into more serious applications generally, which would lead to more sales in the future.

In practice, it would appear that Pocket WordStar is, essentially, the original WordStar rather than a re-working and re-packaging of it. This seems to me to make the price just that bit less defensible, especially when so many CP/Mers of old have long ago cracked all the major problems of transfering copies of programs from one CP/M disc format to another.

I'm not specifically accusing CP/Mers of being software pirates. They don't need to be with so much applications software already in the public domain. It is just that the difference between £149 and, say, £49 could prove just enough to make some of those oldtimers offer their new co-environmentalists in the CP/M world a...what shall we call it....helping hand?

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