Minding Your Business With a Mac

by John Boyd

Apple computer's macintosh has held a small-but-prominent position in the world of corporate computing since its introduction in 1984. Today, although surrounded by the rising seas of Wintel technology, the Macintosh continues to survive in the business world on islands of vital niche applications.

The preferred DTP solution
One such island of success for the Macintosh is in desktop publishing (DTP), the ability for companies to create and produce their own newsletters, pamphlets, and manuals in-house. In fact, it was through its prowess as the best available DTP solution that the Mac first sneaked in through corporate backdoors in the mid-1980s, even as IBM compatibles were elbowing their way in through the front door. Under the cloak of a desktop publishing system, a guise that allowed it to evade the gimlet-eyed information systems managers - those controllers of corporate technology purchasing strings who are inherently distrustful of innovation (given its potential to disrupt the status quo) - the Apple Macintosh was able to enter into offices otherwise enamored of Big Blue.

Desktop publishing blossomed into life a decade ago, with the more-or-less simultaneous launch of Aldus Corporation's PageMaker layout software, Apple's LaserWriter printer, and the Postscript page description language from Adobe Systems. PageMaker enabled users for the first time to compose and lay out their own pages of rich text and graphics on a "personal" computer, eliminating the need to physically cut and paste text and illustrations onto special paper and then send it off to a typesetter. Apple's LaserWriter produced "near professional quality" output with its 300 dots-per-inch printing. And Postscript - the flexible, mathematical shorthand that describes to the printer how to produce WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) output from the Mac's screen - linked the two together without taking forever, and without the necessity of gigabytes of ROM and RAM.

Almost overnight, corporate departments were presented with the means to become their own publishers. The benefits were immediately apparent. Desktop publishing cut costs and the time to publish, and it gave companies much more control over a product that was previously sent to outside typesetters and printers.

Desktop publishing was a turning point for the Macintosh. It established a foothold, which Apple used to gradually expand into other parts of the enterprise in a corporate world that had been almost exclusively focused on the IBM PC-compatible platform. While recent losses and management turmoil inside Apple have worked against those gains, the company now looks solidly set on a comeback course.

Japan Airlines is a case in point. While JAL seems embarrassed to the point of silence that one department uses Macintoshes in an otherwise Wintel shop, the company is nevertheless happy to speak about its other use of Macintoshes: to publish weekly and monthly newsletters. Yukako Ishikawa is one of two specialists employed by JAL on contract to put out its weekly Japanese-language Ohzora (Big Sky) for its domestic employees, and an English-language monthly of the same name that goes out to JAL employees overseas.

Ishikawa and her colleague chiefly use Illustrator for producing charts, photos, tables, special logos, and such, Adobe's Photoshop to crop and touch up pictures, and QuarkXPress - a high-end competitor to PageMaker - for doing the actual layout work. "Illustrator adds flexibility to Xpress," says Ishikawa. "It gives me more freedom to manipulate illustrations and logos." Plus, she notes, the same Japanese language software can be used for creating the English newsletter, thus avoiding the need to buy separate applications.

"Macs have sound, Ethernet, CD-ROM, and SCSI all built in, and they are easy to use and set up. Widows machines can't compare

Ishikawa says IIsi Macs were originally brought in about seven years ago to replace old Matsushita computers that had fallen behind the times. "They couldn't handle photos or freehand drawings," says Ishikawa of the old computers. "That's why we changed over to the Macintoshes." And even though the newsletters of those days were much less sophisticated in appearance, it used to take roughly twice as long to lay them out on the Matsushita machines, she adds.

According to Toshihiro Arai, a public relations director for JAL, the company is planning to publish its newsletters on a corporate intranet (though no date has been set). "We want the newsletters to be even more timely, which means electronic publishing," says Arai. "But we'll continue to publish paper editions, because many of our employees - pilots and cabin crew, for instance - don't have ready access to desktop computers."

Arai assures that JAL has no plans to jettison its Macs. "There are fewer hurdles today for communicating between Macs and PCs, and the Macs are still easier to use. I use a Mac at home," he confesses.

The Mac in fashion
One company unabashedly proud of its Macintoshes is Issey Miyake Design, a well-known Tokyo fashion design house that introduced Macs some seven years ago. Today, its 30 or so staff use over 20 Macintoshes for all aspects of the business - accounting, administration, e-mail, and as an Internet server - as well as in designing clothes.

Kazuhiro Dohman, director of the company's Dohman Section, is responsible for purchasing the systems. He bought the first Macintosh when he saw the quality of the WYSIWYG output from a LaserWriter NTXJ. "I had only seen output from dot matrix printers until the NTXJ," says Dohman.

So impressed was his designer's eye with the kanji output, choices of fonts, and graphics ability of the printer-Mac combo that he immediately sprang for the JPY1,200,000 LaserWriter. Today, he notes, he gets even better output from a LaserWriter that cost just one-tenth the price of that pioneering machine.

When Dohman and his colleagues began using Macs, to help design both women's and men's fashion, they took advantage of the Macintosh's built-in networking features like LocalTalk to exchange files and e-mail. Today, they use the Mac's additional support of Ethernet 10Base-T, which provides a bandwidth of 10 Mbits per second.

Dohman also began using Adobe's Photoshop for design work, and found it especially useful for color correction work. When he learned there was nothing written in Japanese on the way he was using the software, he was inspired to write Photoshop for Product Design, which was published in September 1994.

He also turned his hand to programming, using AppleScript (Apple's programming environment) to write templates for Impact and FileMaker, the presentation and database applications from Apple's software house, Claris Corporation. Dohman is currently working on developing a system to fully computerize the design process from concept to final production of apparel by associate companies. He reckons he now spends as much as two-thirds of his time on programming and related work. "I like programming probably more than designing now," admits Dohman. "It's different, yet I get the same feeling of satisfaction as I do from design work."

When asked if Issey Miyake is content to stay a Macintosh house, his eyes blaze at what he considers an affront to his professionalism. "Of course!" he replies. "We use a couple of Windows computers, but the Macs have sound, Ethernet, CD-ROM, and SCSI all built in, and they are easy to use and set up. Windows machines can't compare."

Mac makes the news
Along with desktop publishers and designers, another group whose members generally have a high regard for the Macintosh is journalists. Dave Lammers is the Tokyo bureau chief for the influential trade weekly Electronic Engineering Times, one of over-a-dozen technology newspapers and magazines published by CMP Media Inc. out of Manhasset, New York. Lammers used an NEC PC98 for eight years, but as the equipment got old, he replaced it with Toshiba laptops.

Under new president Gil Amelio, Apple is making its technology more cross platform compatible

With two other journalists and a couple of part-time office staff on board at the time, Lammers took advantage of the Macintosh's built-in LocalTalk network system and AppleTalk communications protocol. "This was around 1992," recalls Lammers. "If we had gone with IBM, we would have needed a separate server and additional network software."

Not that it's been all plain sailing. Colleague Yoshiko Hara can use Apple Remote Access communications software to get into Lammers' Mac and port files for editing before they are sent to New York. But going the other way has proved to be problematic, since Lammers moved to an early upgrade of MacOS 7.5 "We have to spend a bit of time fooling around with the computers," admits Lammers, who plans to upgrade to the latest 7.5.5 version of the OS to see if that will help.

When digital cameras emerged as affordable products in 1995, Lammers looked into the technology as a possible way to speed up the process of getting pictures to New York in time for the weekly deadlines. "We can FedEx [slides] at JPY5,000 a time, but they can get lost [in the New York office in the rush to meet deadlines] or arrive late," Lammers explains. Research revealed that most digital cameras still have drawbacks in resolution and flexibility, so instead Lammers held on to his conventional camera and ordered a Nikon 35-mm film scanner from the US for around $2,000. When sending a picture now, he slips a color negative into the scanner, and the color image soon pops up on his Mac's screen. Software then lets him crop the image, choose the resolution, and even change the color balance, if necessary.

So far, so good. But when it comes to transmitting the image to New York, he has to forego use of ISDN (NTT's high-speed integrated services digital network), which he's had installed. (NTT's flavor of ISDN doesn't talk with ISDN in the US.) Instead he's forced to dial direct via a standard modem to make an Apple Remote Access connection to the office in New York.

The research Mac
From journalists to scientists. Situated along the southern end of Tokyo Bay in Kanagawa Prefecture is Kirin Brewery's Central Research Laboratory. There, some 40 researchers and 30 support staff use about 100 Macs between them.

As befits Japan's leading brewer of beer, the lab conducts research into such esoteric areas as yeast genetic engineering, plant DNA, protein engineering, and the physiology of the human senses. According to Hiroshi Ikenaga, manager of the research groups, the lab has been using Macintoshes since it opened in 1992.

"When we built the lab, we wanted to use it 24 hours a day," says Ikenaga. "So computer communications became a priority. We chose Macintoshes after comparing them with IBM-compatible and NEC PCs because the Mac was the easiest to use."

The Macs are tied together over four floors via an Ethernet 10Base-5 network. Researchers use them as front-end computers to interface (via telnet communications protocols) with Digital Equipment Corp.'s VAX minicomputers and Silicon Graphics workstations, as well as a Windows NT database server.

The bigger machines are necessary to handle the heavy number crunching that goes on at the heart of the sophisticated research, while the Macs are used for local analysis as well as for standard business applications, including presentations. In addition, Apple Remote Access lets groups work together and allows researchers to carry out work from home. (Security is provided through passwords and a callback system that requires users to register their phone numbers, which are verified through callback before access is granted.)

A router forwards e-mail to Kirin's headquarters, which uses a range of IBM computers. Ikenaga says, however, that since
e-mail is catching on throughout Kirin, the lab staff is experiencing problems attaching files to e-mail that goes to other parts of the IBM-based enterprise.

As with the other users of Macintoshes mentioned above, no outside technology or maintenance support is used in the lab. The researchers and staff have been able to deal with any problems as they have arisen. Some have become members of Macintosh user groups to gain more expertise.

"We will certainly continue with the Macintosh for the next few years," says Ikenaga. "After that, I can't say. Our company's main system is not Mac, so that could cause trouble. But we hope we can continue to use the Macintosh."

His hopes may not be in vain. Under new president Gil Amelio, Apple is making its technology more cross-platform compatible. And with IBM, Motorola, and others licensing the MacOS - not to mention Microsoft's recent moves to give Apple a helping hand - the Macintosh's appeal can only improve.