From the Editor: Is Hype Hip?

By Betty Hawkins



I was relaxing at home, watching the late evening news a couple of weeks ago when I was intrigued by a teaser from the anchor to stay tuned for a story on "amazing new technology for personal computers." Now, technology is the business I'm in, so naturally I "stayed tuned." You already know what I'm going to say, don't you (and I'm cheerfully admitting some bias in the rest of this article)? This "amazing new technology" being touted in a news story by a local Dallas/Fort Worth television station was Windows 95!

Windows 95 is going to "revolutionize the desktop," they told me, then showed me a screenshot of a graphical user interface that looked exactly like OS/2 has looked since early 1992! I listened for what seemed like an eternity through all this glowing praise and unbridled enthusiasm for even the tiniest mention that Microsoft was finally coming out with a copycat, "wannabe" version of OS/2--to no avail.

I was just beginning to recover from the concept of what our television stations feel is newsworthy, when I picked up my Sunday Dallas Morning News and saw "Scoring with Windows 95" blaring in a headline on the front page of the business section. Again, not a single mention of the fact that OS/2 already does what Windows 95 can only hope to do - and OS/2 has been doing well it for years. They do, however, praise Windows 95 "as being more like the Macintosh system that was introduced by Apple Computer Inc. in 1984." They're hyping a product that's emulating an eleven-year-old operating system as being innovative!

OK, I know that you can find lots of good stuff about OS/2 in industry publications, and I'm going to quote you some of it here in a minute. But I am amazed by the charisma emanating from the great Mount Redmond evangelists, and I am further amazed that the hard news media is buying it.

"There is little doubt that Warp is a more mature operating system than its perceived nemesis, Windows 95." - Barry Nance, BYTE

"So, while you're waiting for Windows 95, Warp may make you forget about Windows 95 completely." - Bernie Yee, PC Today

"Corporate customers who have outgrown Windows 3.1 and are waiting for Windows 95 to come to the rescue could be in for countless problems and a colossal disappointment." - Nicholas Petreley, InfoWorld

These and other quotes can be found in an article by noted computer industry consultant, author of Migrating to Windows NT, and contributing editor with Windows Sources magazine, Randall C. Kennedy, in SQ, Software Quarterly magazine. Where you don't see any of these quotes are in your local or national TV or print media news stories.

"How does he do it?" I ask myself. And I know I'm not the only one who noticed this! I console myself because I know the people like you who are responsible for buying the right products for your desktop users are not going to place that much credibility in the frantic media hype that is happening right now. You're going to do your own research, and you are going to carefully weigh everything you read.

"Windows 95 is the latest in a tradition of products short on technical merit and long on hype," Mr. Kennedy says in his SQ article. OS/2 is "the only operating system that scored significantly better than average for overall satisfaction" two years in a row in PC Magazine's annual Reader Support and Satisfaction Survey. That's fact - not hype.

Betty Hawkins, Editor