Showcase - SGI please respond!

[James Helman]

Let's see, if we assume an installed base of 30,000 (a moderately wild
guess) of which say 50% (a completely wild guess) are 4Ds with their
own update media contracts.  At a distribution cost of about $100 per
tape, that's a $1.5M expense to give users something many probably
don't care about and which all will get with IRIX 4.0 anyway.  Even if
that overstates the number by a factor of 2 or more, it's still a
pretty piece of change.  Charging $100 would be reasonable were it not
for the inconvenience that the procurement paperwork presents at many
institutions.  An intermediate solution would be to make the tape
available free, on request, as has been done on occasion for other
software products.  Since in reasonable quantities, CD-ROMS are
substantially cheaper than 1/4" tapes, making free "specials"
available should become easier in the future.

I too am bothered by the software unbundling that is sweeping (?) the
industry.  I'm glad that SGI will include showcase in the IRIX 4.0
distribution.  I wish they would do the same for things such as DWB
(Documenter's Workbench).  There are very many IRISes out there that
have commercial and free third-party software installed, but man pages
are not available because there's no nroff, and the sysadmins haven't
installed something free like awf.  Custom software packages with
obscure command line options are confusing enough to new users even
with man pages.  Unix sans nroff is a big step backwards in user
friendliness.  It's just another missing feature that makes many users
flinch when they have to use another flavor of Unix, such as IRIX.  In
my experience, such "incompatibilities" are the second most common
reason (behind third-party software availability) that people
recommend other platforms.

Unbundling is also more damaging for a company like SGI than for its
larger competitors because many large sites, such as Stanford, have
group licenses for unbundled products from biggies like Sun, but not
from SGI.

Jim Helman
Department of Applied Physics			Durand 012
Stanford University				FAX: (415) 725-3377
(jim at KAOS.stanford.edu) 			Work: (415) 723-9127