Conference 7.286::digital

    Who's Ken OlsOn?

    well, in 1977, one might understand it , i mean that was almost
    16 years ago !, and in 1977, calculators where just 2-3 years old, and
    some people even were still using those funny slide-ruler things to
    do there calculations !.

    like, how many peoples did have PC's in their homes any way in 1977?
    may be Bill gate and few other weirdos like him, and that about it.

    the first time i saw a PC was in 1982, it was an apple at a friend house
    and all what we did with it is play Pac Man all the time 
    (remember the game? ):
    
                                     
         +------+                   +------+               +------+
        /     O  \                 /     O  \             /      O \
       /       +--+               /      +--+            /      +--+
      /      /      ..........   /      /  help ....... /      / ..help
      \      \                   \      \               \      \
       \      +--+                \      +--+            \      +--+
        \        /                 \        /             \        /
         +------+                   +------+               +------+

    
    above is outline of the Pac Man game to help outline my point about 
    early PC's.

    /nasser
    

	Re .0

>>	"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their
>>	 home."  (Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977)
 
>>	Perhaps this also explains the underwhelming presence of DEC 
>>	in the current home computer market. :)

	Perhaps Ken was a greater visionary than you think, already
	in the late 70s perceiving the trend towards the Information 
	Utility?

	People don't want computers (in their homes or elsewhere); 
	they want some information available in an appropriate form.  
	David Stone's favorite analogy for this is the electric drill 
	- "I don't need a drill, I need a HOLE!  I buy a drill only 
	because no-one (yet) can sell me what I really need".

	Jim

    	re .3
    
    	But the home end of that utility will probably have remarkable
    	intelligence (in current mesures) and, if done for humans, different
    	(modular) choices of work load division between the home equipment and
    	the service.
    
    	--Ritva
    

    re: .3

    That's funny.  I bought my drill because I wanted to be able to insert
    and remove screws easily.  I only occasionally want holes and most
    powered screw drivers aren't very good at making holes, so I bought one
    tool that can do both.
    
    How does this relate to computers?  Simple.  People want tools that can
    do more than one function well.  I don't want a PC at home.  I want
    something that replaces the functionality of my stereo, my TV, (both
    satellite and cable), my security system, my telephone, answering
    machine/voice mail, controls my home environment, AND my computing
    needs, that is voice controlled from anywhere, but I'll settle for a
    remote control for local use and telephone line connections for remote
    access, until voice is available.
    
    Bob

	Computers are not a tool, they are a medium.
tom

    Computers are not tools, nor are they a medium, they are devices. 
    Computer users decide to make them tools or to make them a medium or to
    make them a menace or to ignore them completely.
    
    
    Power to the people!  :-)
    
    Dick

    computers will be most useful to people when they dont know that it is
    a computer they are dealing with.
    
    they should not even know it is a device or a medium or a tool or a hole,
    they should use the thing and not think about what is it.

    /nasser


    

I STILL don't know anybody who has a computer in his or her home 
unless they are:

	a) a computer nerd who uses it to log in and do work at home

	b) a person who has a workplace in his or her home

Therefore, I don't know anyone who has a computer in his/her HOME.
It's in an office (which happens to be located in the home).  

nina

    I can't personally see any real HOME use for a computer, either.
    At least not yet.  I hope I can keep my home life simple enough
    not to require a computer.
    All the talk about balancing checkbooks and keeping recipies on
    file of a few years ago: why bother?  I'm not going to entrust
    my checkbook information to a computer that might eat the disk
    or go south just when I need to pay the phone bill, and unless
    one has a computer terminal on the kitchen counter, how can one
    use stored recipies?  Besides, who is going to bother to take the
    time to type in the contents of a dozen cookbooks?
    Keep the checkbook balance in the checkbook, put the cookbook on
    the counter, and forget the computer.
    I can see a home use for a word processor to write letters, perhaps...
    but how many people write that many letters?

    ahem.  Careful what you say,  I don't consider myself
    a "computer nerd", but I have a 486sx at home.  Yes,
    I do log in occasionally when I'm sick or on the weekend to 
    keep up on my mail, but most of my work on it has
    nothing to do with work.
    
    a cross-section of my work.  Windows Checkbook program, 
    personal budget in Microsoft Excel, Letters to various 
    people for various reasons, compuserve access, where 
    I keep in touch with my whole family all over the country,
    Occasional diversions (games), I create a newsletter using
    a windows publishing system for my church.  Maintain a clipper
    database for Church Singles mailing list and membership information.
    Do some light programming in windows and Basic ffor applications 
    that I need, etc.  Computers are a wonderful tool, if you
    know how to use them to your advantage
    
    a keyboard in front of you does not mean that you have to have taped
    glasses and a pocket protector, slide rule, and other stereotypes.  
    
    Dan
    

    Oh yea, and most recently, I use Lotus organizer to keep
    track of my calendar, address book, to do lists, and anniversarys which 
    in turn prints out to day-timer forms.  Therfore I have both a
    electronic and paper version of my daytimer.  Great way to keep 
    records.
    
    

    RE: most past
    
    Unfortunately, I find use for a computer at home, due to school. The
    kids always have reports and such which teachers require typed. Also,
    it helps a great deal keeping up with my hobby.... I am able to keep
    track of hobby related stuff.... 
    
    So.... if you have school aged kids, you will most likely end up with a
    PC of some flavor or another.... Give it time.
    
    I remember when calculaters weren't permissable in a classroom. Now, my
    youngest son has the use of a "lap top", when in school...
    
    Who knows what we will be seeing in another 15... who can figure.!
    
    Later!
    

    plus if you have a PC at home , people who visit you think you must very
    smart, just make sure you put the PC right in the middle of living
    room, so they can see it, and start telling them all about the DOS
    thing and about floppy disks, and things like that, they'll be so proud 
    and very impressed by you.

    /nasser

    Considering a Nintendo box is a computer of sorts, there are lots more
    home computers out there than you might imagine.
    
    Seriously, my PC at home is much more of an entertainment tool than
    anything else.  I've paid much more for games and sound stuff than I
    did for the PC itself.
    
    Geoff
    

    I think we have fallen into a trap here.  Who cares what people do with
    a machine at home; they buy them - thats whats important.  Who are we
    to say that a checkbook keeper, or recipe database, or pong game is
    trivial?  If there is a market for trivial home based systems, and we
    can fill it profitably, perhaps better than the competition, then why
    are we spending time looking down our nose at that market?  Isn't this
    how Sun gained so much elbow room in the desktop space?
    
    What worries me more than anything else is our tendancy towards 
    "Dec-no-centricity" (tm).  It still blinds us, especially in areas our
    customers seem to be playing more and more, and, where we haven't been
    players in the past.
    
    Oh well, enuf is enuf.
     

    re .9:
    
    	Do you know anybody with a CD player or video recorder in their
    home who is not in either category. If so you know someone with a
    computer in their home!

	Not to many people need a PC at home. But than again lots of
	people buy lots of things they don't need. What do people want
	is probably a better question to ask than what do they need.

			Alfred

    Re .19 -- Yes, but isn't it a central tenet of economics that
    wants are virtually unlimited?
    
    

    "Necessity is the mother of invention"


    		NOT

    Want is the mother of invention..??


    BUT, in one persons' mind.... his want could/would be classified as a 
    need. 

    If someone wants something bad enough, he/she will justify it by
    rationalizing it as a need..., a tool...., At that point, he/she can
    justify the cost... etc.... 

    As stated earlier, if wants and/or needs exist, Digital should make
    efforts to offer solutions to those wants and/or needs, as long as
    those needs relate to our product line.... and are legal.
    
    

    
    Part of the problem is that we (here in the oh-so-rational world
    of Digital) lose sight of some important things. For example, I don't *need*
    a CD player with carousel, but I have one.  I never needed a 
    VCR (but I have two -- pressure from the kids, don't you know :-));
    I don't need cable TV in both my living room and family room, and
    I could do without the two bills, but I had it installed.  I didn't
    need to buy a CD-ROM for $600.00 to watch two minute clips of moving
    and roaring elephants on a multi-media encyclopedia.  
    
    I somehow rationalized those purchases (through tortuous logic
    as I recall), convinced my wife (who could do quite nicely without
    being plugged into the information economy, to her credit), and
    put them all on the VISA card, where I now spend an additional 16% or 
    so to pay for them.
    
    Now, I am not stupid.  I am actually reasonably well-read and educated.
    So, we (Digital) need to be very careful about being so arrogrant as
    to say, "people will never need <insert_your_favorite_electronic_toy>"
    at home".  I suspect, from visits to my friends' houses, that I am
    not alone.  One of my friends is a union ironworker.  At home, he has
    a 486/50 PC, with a video capture card and camera; he is busily putting
    all the slides he has ever taken into .GIF format, making them 
    self-extracting, and was thinking about selling a service like that 
    to local real-estate companies; he is currently evaluating whether
    Kodak already grabbed that niche with it's new product.
    
    Markets are a varied patchwork of people, with different interests,
    tastes, beliefs.  We need to shake this apparent homogeneous image of our 
    customers and understand that they are as varied as ourselves and
    the characters you see and hear about every day.
    
    We need to figure out what people want and give it to them.  We also
    need to take risks, because some people don't know they want something
    until it's available.  One of the most interesting suggestions I've
    seen in one of the notes conferences was trying to sell Alpha_AXP(tm)
    to a game maker like Sega or Nintendo.  Perphaps virtual reality
    games (or pseudo-games) are a *huge* market.  Perhaps not.  The point
    is, we'll never know if we don't try.  
    
    Glenn
    

    "Necessity can be a real mother."
    
    -- seen in a novel maybe 15 years ago

    do people think also that the level of general education in society
    reflect how much people need or use a PC in their homes?

    I mean a population that relatively has lower level of education
    would probably have less need to PC's , while one with a higher general
    level of education (scientific and/or liberal) would have more need/use
    for PC's.

    to get a measure of this, let make up something, call it PC/HOME
    density.

    you find this by counting the number of home PC's in the country, and 
    divide this number by the size of the population, if this density is 
    closer to 1, then the population are very PC literate and the general
    level of education is higher, if the density if near zero, it is the 
    other way round, if the density is greater than 1 (i.e. more home PC's 
    than there are people ), this means that the country is full of nerds.

    it would be nice to see this PC/HOME density number distribution all
    over the world, this would be very useful for marketing and sales
    people to see where they should target their marketing at.
    
    of course we can apply this density measure not just to countries, but also 
    to local communities at the state and local level.

    Iam hope i did not say anything not PC by the above.

    /nasser

    Slightly more than 50% of the current U.S. PC market is the consumer
    sector.  There must easily be in excess of 120-130,000,000 PCs
    installed worlwide (Microsoft has sold more than 100,000,000 copies
    of DOS).  I leave the computation of the U.S. PC/home density based
    on this to others more familiar with worldwide distribution and U.S.
    population data.
    
    	Bill

    
    
    Necessity is the mother of invention...
    
    
                 Want is the mother of capitalism.

    Nasser:
    
    Another good one...

    
    re: some early entries and the date "1977"
    
    I noticed no one mentioned that by '77 there were quite a few examples
    of Home Computers around. The original home 'package' - the MITS Altair
    was already several years old and Southwest Technical had sold many to
    computer hobby types. I had participated in a proposal to use a
    variation of the Altair in a library application. 
    
    National Semi was putting out a steady steam of info sheets on their
    computer chips and had funded a user group that had published info on
    building your own computer. Several people used the info to go into
    their own business of "I'll build it for you."
    
    There were at least three PC releated mag's on the newstands that
    catered to a very fast growing, from a sizeable base, number of home
    computer builders, users and business types. 
    
    By 1977 the founder of BYTE had long been saying, if you wanted to get
    rich, get into PCs. He had been proven right by 1977, let alone the
    ensuing years.
    
    So just in case you weren't there or forgot - PCs were alive and well
    in 1977 and have been getting better ever since.
    
    J.B.

    Gee.  Someone in my storage area I have a Processor Technoology Sol-20
    with 48K/RAM and Northstart drives running CP/M dating from 1977. 
    During high school I used it to dial up at the amazingly fast speed of
    300 baud (the ASR33s at school only did 110).

    In 1977, I was enviously examining Apple II's and Visicalc every time I
    got near a computer store.  I was the only manager in Digital of Puerto
    Rico who had ever used a computer even though we built them here.  Even
    the engineers didn't start using them until I broke the ice by getting
    a bootleg account on the process test machines.  Then they built up
    workstations from cosmetically damaged equipment.
    
    Dick

>	"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their
>	 home."  (Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977)
 
>Perhaps this also explains the underwhelming presence of DEC in the current
>home computer market. :)

    I believe that in 1948 Mr. Watson, Sr, of IBM, stated that he could not 
forsee the need for more than perhaps 5-6 computers in the whole world for 
processing information. He continued to be the CEO of IBM for some time 
after that faux paus (sp?).......

    Foresight in this business is tough for many folks, not just KO....

    	Vic

    Would a moderator of this file please fix the spelling of Ken's last
    name in the title of this topic (it's OlsEn)? Thanks.
    
    Ken....
    

    re: Ken Olsen and PC's
    
    Ken may have been wrong about PC's in the home but I understand he
    was very much behind Digital's efforts in professional PC. I thought
    that the PRO 350 was widely regarded as Ken's pet project, or was
    that just rumour?
    
    Our problem with PC's was not that Digital did not recognize the
    importance of that market, indeed in 1984 they were supposed to
    represent about 50% of total revenues [this was a 1983 forecast],
    rather we never admitted that we had a failed strategy and took 
    the appropriate measures to correct it.