Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 12/86 - checked

December 1986

Well, Christmas is nearly upon us once again and the kids are getting excited because parent persons are considering...just considering, mind.....whether they might indulge in a personal computer this time.

It is a difficult problem for them. They maybe missed out on the last rounds of Christmas techno-glutony, when parents from every part of this festered isle seemed to rush out and buy their off-spring a Spectrum or a BBC or a Commodore 64 or a whatever, only to find that in a reasonably high percentage of cases it hadn't fulfilled the parental dream. Children rarely do, of course.

Instead of instantly learning ALL about computers, getting jobs as chief programmers with software companies and getting a Ferrari they were too young and inexperienced to drive (a particular dream of the yuppy parent, who might then get the chance to drive the thing themselves), most kids simply learned how to zap space invaders of one race, colour, and dubious religeous persuasion in a bloodless orgy of commuted violence.

If not that, the luckless Christmas present found its way into the back of a cupboard, there to remain until discovered, many centuries later, by ardent anthropologists who would set out to prove that the find marked the emergence, or breakdown of, `civilisation'.

Some lucky machines would be given some useful status in the home, propping up the short leg of the kitchin table.All that was in the old days however. Now the parent persons have a justifiable reason to rush out and buy a personal computer for the family, a reason of their own. The emergence of the Amstrad PC1512 brings them the industry standard desk-top marriage of person and machine at a price which makes it attractive for the home user.

It has all the bits needed; PC compatibility (well, at the time of writing this the first doubts about how total that compatibility is have started to appear... needless to say, it is likely to prove as compatible as most others). It is also generating a new splurge of cheap applications software spun off the back of old, usually fairly well-proven packages. Best of all, it is not expensive.

This, for the individual home user is not quite the same thing as being cheap. At £499 for the lowest-cost single disk version, it is still a goodly lump of disposable income. This is not the whole price story, either, for most users are going to want a printer, and even a cheap one adds to the price. Also, any half-serious user will soon appreciate that a dual disk version is a much better option, so once again the real price will go up.

Despite all this, it still represents what marketing executives love to call an `aggressive price position relative to the competition'. That competition has, until now, had its sights firmly set on the business side of the IBM PC-compatible marketplace. That, after all, has been where virtually all the sales have been. One of the key levers that could bring the Amstrad machine into the home in large numbers this Christmas, is the fact that there are now many people using PCs at work.

Having a PC at home as well could prove to be very helpful in the parents' working lives, making them able to do something creative/essential/demanded-of-them-by-their-boss in their own time. It could also go a bundle in the self-esteem battles with the neighbours....."still trying to do consolidated accounts on that?" you could say to a neighbour, as you disdainfully stare down at a tarted-up games machine.

But hereby lies a potential problem for Amstrad in getting the PC1512 into homes. Alternatively, it could spell a problem for lots of computer manufacturers, IBM being not least amongst them.

The nature of the problem is in the existing systems used by many companies (and therefore many potentially Amstrad-buying parents). The growth in the clone market generally has cut IBM to the quick, and there is a general consensus that the company is now going to do its best to move the business/corporate PC marketplace to new machines, probably of a more proprietary nature.

There is much less concensus as to what these new machines might be like; whether they will be based on Intel's new 386 processor, the existing 286 processor with new, proprietary software, or the RISC-based RT/PC line. It could move in any or all of these directions, and probably will, fairly soon.

The next question, however, is whether those corporate users will actually play the game and follow the new tracks being set out for them by IBM, and some other manufacturers as well. To be sure, some of them will.

Some will be IBM houses right across the board, in which case a move to new machines (that will almost certainly include integral facilities for micro-mini-mainframe communications) will be natural and essential. Others will be DEC-based establishments, in which case the new VAXmate MS-DOS machine will attract, as it gives them the growth path they would like between the PC environment and the overall VAX environment.

For executives in these companies, they may find that the idea of having a PC at home could be severely prejudiced by its potential incompatibility with what the company is now going to use. This, in turn, could adversely affect the demand for Amstrad PCs in the home market.

On the other hand, there could be growing instances of what I have in the past refered to as FIRN: Functional Interia Response Neurosis. This can come in many forms, including the classic `wait until the price drops low enough to buy, and then when it is find that a later model has more interesting features that you are willing to wait for until the price drops low enough (repeat endless until the technology is no longer relevent).

Another form however is where existing users just get fed up with all the changes foisted on them by the industry. In this case, they simply refuse to buy, partly because they don't yet understand the capabilities of the systems they already have, and partly because they haven't yet used up their applicability.

In this case, they will stick with what they know - the PC. The big companies will get egg on their collective faces and Amstrad.... well, Amstrad could sell heavily not only into the home, but business as well. Next year should be fun.

end