Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Swaine's Flames


FEB88: SWAINE'S FLAMES

True magazines really do have something like personality. You can develop a relationship with them. That's why it seems so unfair when a publisher repositions an old friend, as McGraw-Hill is doing with Byte. It's all the more annoying when the change seems so patently unnecessary. Isn't it obvious that we need a Scientific American of computer technology more than we need another PC magazine? Not to McGraw-Hill it isn't.

McGraw-Hill is not alone in opting for the product-catalog approach; the trend is depressingly widespread. Even our new section of short reviews, Examining Room (debuting in this issue), could be seen as symptomatic of the trend. But DDJ is, I assure you, in no danger of becoming a product catalog. It wouldn't fit with the personality.

Speaking of personality, the Peter Norton T-shirt came in the mail recently, close on the heels of the Peter Norton poster, the Peter Norton Christmas card, and the Peter Norton coffee cup. (If you didn't like the coffee cup, Peter Norton would send you a Peter Norton hammer to smash it with.)

Now I believe that the Norton Utilities are nifty, and that Peter has as much right as anybody to throw his hat in the ring for Mr. Cultural Icon of 1988, but all this fuss over a company that produces programs for wiping files and cleaning up directories gives me pause. Norton is, after all, in the utility business, a sort of electronic Tidy Bowl man, the digital descendant of Ed Norton. Is this an image you want to display on your coffee table? Consider well when marking your ballot.

Another clean-cut kid, Rob Dickerson, has been making news lately, in the sections of what newspaper business pages call Transitions. Some of you know Dickerson from Microsoft's language division. In December he became Borland's latest acquisition, with the new title of vice president, product marketing. Microsoft responded to Dickerson's career move with a lawsuit and a restraining order, and Borland countersued. By the time you read this the suits should be settled, or at least moot.

Microsoft had reason to be upset; Dickerson knows a lot that could be useful to the competition, and that means Borland. (I am specifically not referring to his knowledge of Microsoft strategies. I have no knowledge regarding Rob's knowledge about Microsoft strategies, thank you, Microsoft lawyers. What I have is informed opinion.) Meanwhile, Borland is building new quarters in Scotts Valley to accommodate its growth. I think it is going to call the new space the Borland campus.

I spent many pages in this magazine last year campaigning for articles on how to break various bandwidth bottlenecks. Bandwidth is, unfortunately, becoming a vogue word. You can find it in John Sculley's Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple, where Sculley applies it to marketing. He probably picked up this usage from Steve Jobs, a good man with a metaphor.

You can find the term used more precisely and with more purpose in The Media Lab by Stewart Brand, a good book on current research at MIT into the convergent technologies of publishing, computing, and broadcasting. The principais in The Media Lab believe that bandwidth reduction is the issue of the decade, and they are acting on that belief. I recommend Brand's book. (I haven't been inspired to read Sculley's yet.)

I sometimes think that Marlin Ouverson, a former DDJ editor, timed his leaving so that he could title his farewell editorial, in paraphrase of Richard Henry Dana, "Two Years Before the Masthead."

Which leads me to the following.

I became editor-in-chief of Dr. Dobb's Journal in 1984 and have now spent more years at the helm than any other editor (including Marlin Ouverson). While I am fond of this magazine and think it serves a need that the product-catalog magazines don't, four years is a long tim~a third of the life of the magazine, a tenth of my own life, longer than Sculley has been at Apple (or about as long as there has been a Macintosh product line)--and these four years have been four years away from full-time writing on the rock pile of a largely administrative job.

For a writer, that's a long sentence.

So, over the next few months, I will be creating a new role for myself with the magazine, one that will allow me to do more writing. I plan to research and write about topics close to my interests and, according to our reader survey and to my informal survey in the November issue, close to yours as well.

More about that next month.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.