★ PEOPLES ★ AMSTRAD BIDS FOR STARDOM IN THE CITY (POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY) ★ |
| Amstrad bids for stardom in the City (Popular Computing Weekly) |
AMSTRAD'S furious reaction to recent suggestions that its PC could be unreliable speaks volumes about the company's plans for the machine. In order to become a world force in business computing, Amstrad has to sell large volumes to big companies, to the corporate market, and unless the company can contain the whispering campaign about the PC it won't be able to persuade the big buyers to bite. Whether it succeeds or fails Amstrad's commitment to the corporate market has implications for its other machines. As the company concentrates on the business machines the home machines are liable to suffer from neglect, and the PC's launch inevitably spells trouble for the PCW. The price rise on the PC will help differentiate it from the PCW in the short term, and a massive advertising campaign for the latter will also help shore up sales, but their roles are still too similar for them both to survive in the long term. Amstrad marketing manager Malcolm Miller was talking about the two last week at an Amstrad in the City seminar organised by C/WP Computers. The PCW, he said, "is there as a word processor. The PC runs word processing software, but it's not really a word processor." Miller may be privy to some information that shows that the Z80 processor is more suited to word processing than the 8086, but the fact of the matter is that both the PCW and the PC are computers, and Amstrad can't sustain the argument that they're not for long. But while the PC is the logical successor to the PCW in the small business market Amstrad will have to work if it's to break through into big business, and although Amstrad itself didn't organise last week's seminar this is basically what it was all about. The speakers were keen to scotch any stones of unreliability. David Randall, marketing director of ADT, said that his company had tested the PC with "a wide range of products, and found no difficulties with either overheating or the power supply." But he did tacitly admit that the rating of the PC's power supply could be too low for some tasks. Installing a Western Digital hard disc in exchange for one of the machine's floppies, for example, would result in a 40 per cent reduction in power draw, and this makes it "ideal for use in the Amstrad." Similarly he extolled the vir-tures of high capacity hard drives. "They have their own independent power supplies, so the power limitations on the Amstrad are not a problem,” Randall claims to have tested products in conditions "in excess of Amstrad's rating” (for the power supply) without running into problems, but it's clear that Amstrad's power supply doesn't have the output of IBM's. In the same vein Malcolm Miller pointed out that Amstrad had taken PCs and 'baked them beyond normal use. and beyond what some of the press have written about/' but this isn't exactly the point. If an expansion card draws more power than is available a fuse will blow, and this will happen no matter how many ovens you put a machine in. The power problem of course isn't exactly Amstrad's fault. Most IBM addon cards will run in the PC without problems, but certain combinations draw too much power, and can cause trouble under certain circumstances. The reason the problem arises is because the original IBM had a large chip set drawing a fairly substantial amount of power and had card slots designed to cope with similarly chunky expansion cards. Amstrad's systems are technologically more petite, and both the power supply and the card slots are rated lower than those on the IBM. So an expansion combination that pushes the IBM PC to its limit will almost certainly blow the Amstrad's fuse. If you view this as Amstrad paying for IBM's deficiencies you should start to understand the former's indignation on the subject. Amstrad also has the right to be slightly miffed by the way the matter has been blown up. Practically all expansion cards will work with the Amstrad, and only a few, relatively old designs will cause problems, usually when several are being run together. IBM itself has got off lightly in the compatibility stakes purely because it set the standard in the first place, and since then it has launched four machines (the Junior, PC Portable, AT and Convertible) which aren't fully compatible with the PC. Amstrad's record is short, but so far better, and the company has some hopes of supplanting IBM. “The standard is going to be with us for many years," says Miller. "Some people have termed it the Amstrad standard. Maybe IBM will leave it alone and concentrate on other areas." He didn't specify who had termed it the Amstrad standard, and at the moment is unlikely to convince many people that IBM is on the point of walking away from the PC mass market, but given the power of the opposition his uncharacteristic use of the word * ‘maybe'' is understandable. So far Amstrad has had to cope with nasty rumours and a dickering share price, but what would happen if IBM really started to get worried? Popular Computing Weekly (1986-11)
|
