The hard edge
Alice furrowed her brow in introspection and slipped her hand into the tote, barely aware of what she was doing. In a time-honored tradition, she plucked out the past 12 issues of Computer Shopper (no longer such a spectacular feat, Bill mused). The behemoth of pulp friction had somehow managed to slip from a puffy 1,000 pages to a mere 300 or so, and now appeared in traditional magazine dimensions as well. Bill just shook his head. It was going to be a cold year in the Basement of Doom and Pepsi-Cola. (Either that or he'd need to start buying firewood.) Alice spread the magazines across the table, slid the January 2000 edition from the selection, and opened to "The Hard Edge."
"You know," she said, taking a sip from her margarita (stirred, not blended), "We've had some heck of a year. We finally got a P7!"
"Sure," intoned Bill, blowing bubbles into his Pepsi through the bendable drinking straw. "But Intel is calling it the Pentium 4 and telling us it's not going to do well with current software because this new CPU is so advanced."
"Didn't they say the same thing about the 60MHz Pentium when it was released?" asked Alice.
"Yup. And do you know when the Pentium actually got faster?"
"When Intel decreased the die size..."
"...which is exactly what's happening with the Pentium 4," Bill continued. "Better still, anyone buying one of the King Kong P4s now in anticipation of the arrival of new software..."
"...will probably take a bath on the price as the cost of P4 systems drop by the time the software finally shows up." After almost eight-and-a-half years together doing "The Hard Edge," it was quite common for Alice and Bill to complete each other's sentences. In fact, at that point, they didn't need to say anything at all. Each just knew what the other would have said. The dialog was only meant as a study aid for those around them who were eavesdropping.
"And Microsoft introduced Windows Millennium Edition in 2000 a year early, which is probably better than the two-year delay it had for the introduction of Windows 96, er, Windows 98."
"Thankfully," added Bill, "we have a better sense of timing." Which was Bill's way of saying, "Welcome to 'The Hard Edge' 2001. Not only is it the start of a new calendar millennium, it's the beginning of a digital age: 01.01.01. And boy are we going to have a lot of fun with it."
(For those of you with subscriptions, who are reading this near the end of December, just play along. For those of you in Montana, put the crayon down now.)
Last month Alice wrote about a company called CafePress.com that allows you to build an online store in less than 10 minutes, carry your own logo-ed merchandise, and decide the markup on each item—all without charging you a dime for the service, shipping, or order processing. Many "Hard Edge" readers wrote in offering oddly polite thanks when they were able to set up their own stores for their softball teams and even family memorabilia.
But Alice isn't content selling coffee mugs with her name on them and letting the larger issue go uninvestigated. She started thinking about what CafePress was doing when it flipped the business model neatly around, and she began some serious online searching for more information on the topic. Guess what? There really wasn't any. Although it's still incredibly early, Alice thinks she may have hit on a trend no one has written about.
It's called v-commerce. Write this down, and lock in the date when you first heard it, because Alice thinks this may be the way of the future.
The "v" stands for "virtual," and as the name suggests, the idea is to open an online store, put your name on it, and sell a huge catalog of items without actually owning any inventory or infrastructure. When you think about it, Amazon.com did that with the Ingram catalog, but it also had the huge added expense of creating the commerce platform, designing its own warehouses, and so on. The question on Alice's mind: Was it possible to create a store that rivaled Amazon in basic features, selection, related products, customer service, and so forth, without actually shelling out a dime? Could one go virtual in the commerce space and avoid the overhead expenses that pulled down the stock prices of so many e-commerce companies?
After much research, Alice found a company that lets you do just that. Vstore.com (www.vstore.com) will let you set up your own store in less than 5 minutes, and you can go as narrow (just mystery books) or as wide (electronics superstore with 20,000 items in categories ranging from home appliances to computers) as you like. The store-building software is sophisticated; you can pick from designs such as "Amoeba," layer in color schemes (Alice chose "Sailboat"), and even choose from an array of typefaces. From there, you can leave the store on autopilot or pick which products you want to feature on the various categories' doors.
The cost to you: nothing. You get between 5 percent and 15 percent of each sale, which means pure profit from the first time your cash register rings. Of course, getting people to your site can cost you some serious money if you're truly serious, but if you stay away from Super Bowl ads and customize your store into a nice place people will remember, you still come out ahead. On the Vstore side, they just concentrate on what they do best: getting in a ton of merchandise and improving their store-building tools. With both sides taking care of business, who knows, maybe this will be the way to successful e-commerce for many small companies.
So what's the catch? The first would be Vstore's viability long term. Vstore is backed by CMGI, an investment umbrella corporation that has been saddled with a lot of failing dot-coms. And so far, it has more than 1 million products ready to go, but with so many dot-coms failing, Alice would never predict the longevity or likelihood of any company these days. The good news is with no investment needed on your part, it doesn't hurt to set up your own store and take a crack at being a virtual merchant on your lunch break. At the least, you can buy from your own store and treat yourself to a nice discount. Pricing overall, Alice found after doing some store-by-store comparisons, was on the midrange side. You'll definitely find cheaper places out there, but overall, the Vstore platform is robust, nicely stocked, and fairly priced.
Alice rarely writes so positively about any company, but free technical things that cost other people millions is like having the last laugh "Hard Edge" style. So check out Vstore and become your own merchant. Even if you never make a dime, at least you'll be in good company and out far less pocket money than Mr. Bezos.
If you want to check out Alice's test store, try alicestore.vstoreelectronics.com.
Bill's crystal ball is still at the urologist, so it's difficult to tell three weeks before its official introduction (in "Hard Edge" time) whether the industry is taking the release of Intel's Pentium 4 as badly as it should. (If Intel's stock has dipped to around 30, it probably has.) There's a great opportunity here.
In the past, Bill has given AMD a hard time for its lack of innovation. Let's face it, the company's chip strategies have kept it in Intel's shadow even during those times when it initially beat Intel to the punch.
Now, however, with Intel seemingly incapable of doing anything right (do Pentium-based computers support DDR SDRAM yet?), this is the time for AMD to step in with something new and incredible, not just different and cheaper. (All right, it can keep the cheaper part.) How about a 1.8GHz (or faster) Athlon that will kick Intel's butt firmly and decisively (and not just in the minds of Athlonophiles) by proving you can brute-force your way through the FPU without resorting to new and unavailable programming routines, as Intel would have us believe is the case for SSE2?
How about a 2GHz Athlon that's priced such that you could buy a system with a 60GB hard drive, the latest and greatest graphics card (more likely than not something with an nVidia chip on it for 3D), DVD/CD-RW drive, great sound and speakers (Dolby 5:1, of course) and a 19-inch monitor (which Alice and Bill are declaring the new standard monitor size for the digital age) for less than $2,500 on the very first day the CPU is available? That would be a hoot. It can be done.
When Bill's next-door neighbor asked for a recommendation about a system that would handle digital movie editing and creation, it was with a heavy heart that Bill recommended the iMac DV Plus. Sure, when Bill started his career (many years ago) he did so by focusing on Apple products. Two of the six books Bill wrote were about Apple computers (the IIc and the Macintosh). But that romance ended in 1985 as Macs became ponderous and overpriced, and PCs were beginning to become downright bargains.
So what's changed to make Bill cut even this small inroad? Apple has done something very smart over the years, and it's finally paying off. The core features it wants for its computers are integrated on the motherboard. Normally, Alice and Bill are very much opposed to that and, in general, they still are. But if you look at something like FireWire, which on the PC has become less than a second-class citizen in favor of pokey old USB, that strategy can pay off big time.
Why do PCs need FireWire? They need the speed. USB won't cut it for 30-fps digital streaming video no matter what platter they try to serve it to you on. "But there are FireWire interface cards available," you cry. Yes, there are, but with minor exceptions, they're hit-or-miss propositions with the capability of causing resource-hogging complications. If that does happen, fingers point all over the place. You put FireWire on the PC's motherboard, you make the BIOS responsible for managing it, and you get rid of all of the angst in one swell foop. Hats off to Apple for taking the lead (again?) in bringing new technology to the consumer without the need for an accompanying packet of lubricant.
If you haven't wished Alice and Bill a happy hundredth "Hard Edge" by sending them an e-mail or even a card, shame on you! Luckily, it's a brand-new year, and you can start things off fresh by sending Alice and Bill a fine rant or comment of a technical nature. Alice has been pleased by all the mail she's been getting now that she controls the e-mail address, so please keep the kind words and comments coming.
"The Hard Edge"
Computer Shopper
28 E. 28th St., 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10016-7922
hardedge@zdnet.com
Alice and Bill's Resolutions for the New Year
1. Install Windows Me on every 600MHz or faster system and play a lot of Spider Solitaire.
2. Put a few 60GB or 70GB drives online in the BofD&PC in anticipation of Matrox's Marvel 450 card.
3. Get a DVD-RAM drive.
4. Hack into TiVo and upgrade the available record time to 200 hours.
5. Find one meaningful use for a Web-enabled cell phone.
6. Wash the Corvette.
7. Keep making fun of Intel until it starts doing things right again.
8. Finally get a Web site for "The Hard Edge."
9. Upgrade to all gigahertz devices—phones, CPUs, and so on.
10. Dump AOL account. As the last seconds of 2000 ticked away, the ball dropped in Times Square, the confetti was tossed, noisemaker sounds echoed off the canyon walls of New York City, and all the champagne corks popped, the first thing Alice said was, "Another year, another $14.75!" Bill heaved a small sigh of relief as well.
Alice furrowed her brow in introspection and slipped her hand into the tote, barely aware of what she was doing. In a time-honored tradition, she plucked out the past 12 issues of Computer Shopper (no longer such a spectacular feat, Bill mused). The behemoth of pulp friction had somehow managed to slip from a puffy 1,000 pages to a mere 300 or so, and now appeared in traditional magazine dimensions as well. Bill just shook his head. It was going to be a cold year in the Basement of Doom and Pepsi-Cola. (Either that or he'd need to start buying firewood.) Alice spread the magazines across the table, slid the January 2000 edition from the selection, and opened to "The Hard Edge."
"You know," she said, taking a sip from her margarita (stirred, not blended), "We've had some heck of a year. We finally got a P7!"
"Sure," intoned Bill, blowing bubbles into his Pepsi through the bendable drinking straw. "But Intel is calling it the Pentium 4 and telling us it's not going to do well with current software because this new CPU is so advanced."
"Didn't they say the same thing about the 60MHz Pentium when it was released?" asked Alice.
"Yup. And do you know when the Pentium actually got faster?"
"When Intel decreased the die size..."
"...which is exactly what's happening with the Pentium 4," Bill continued. "Better still, anyone buying one of the King Kong P4s now in anticipation of the arrival of new software..."
"...will probably take a bath on the price as the cost of P4 systems drop by the time the software finally shows up." After almost eight-and-a-half years together doing "The Hard Edge," it was quite common for Alice and Bill to complete each other's sentences. In fact, at that point, they didn't need to say anything at all. Each just knew what the other would have said. The dialog was only meant as a study aid for those around them who were eavesdropping.
"And Microsoft introduced Windows Millennium Edition in 2000 a year early, which is probably better than the two-year delay it had for the introduction of Windows 96, er, Windows 98."
"Thankfully," added Bill, "we have a better sense of timing." Which was Bill's way of saying, "Welcome to 'The Hard Edge' 2001. Not only is it the start of a new calendar millennium, it's the beginning of a digital age: 01.01.01. And boy are we going to have a lot of fun with it."
(For those of you with subscriptions, who are reading this near the end of December, just play along. For those of you in Montana, put the crayon down now.)
Last month Alice wrote about a company called CafePress.com that allows you to build an online store in less than 10 minutes, carry your own logo-ed merchandise, and decide the markup on each item—all without charging you a dime for the service, shipping, or order processing. Many "Hard Edge" readers wrote in offering oddly polite thanks when they were able to set up their own stores for their softball teams and even family memorabilia.
But Alice isn't content selling coffee mugs with her name on them and letting the larger issue go uninvestigated. She started thinking about what CafePress was doing when it flipped the business model neatly around, and she began some serious online searching for more information on the topic. Guess what? There really wasn't any. Although it's still incredibly early, Alice thinks she may have hit on a trend no one has written about.
It's called v-commerce. Write this down, and lock in the date when you first heard it, because Alice thinks this may be the way of the future.
The "v" stands for "virtual," and as the name suggests, the idea is to open an online store, put your name on it, and sell a huge catalog of items without actually owning any inventory or infrastructure. When you think about it, Amazon.com did that with the Ingram catalog, but it also had the huge added expense of creating the commerce platform, designing its own warehouses, and so on. The question on Alice's mind: Was it possible to create a store that rivaled Amazon in basic features, selection, related products, customer service, and so forth, without actually shelling out a dime? Could one go virtual in the commerce space and avoid the overhead expenses that pulled down the stock prices of so many e-commerce companies?
After much research, Alice found a company that lets you do just that. Vstore.com (www.vstore.com) will let you set up your own store in less than 5 minutes, and you can go as narrow (just mystery books) or as wide (electronics superstore with 20,000 items in categories ranging from home appliances to computers) as you like. The store-building software is sophisticated; you can pick from designs such as "Amoeba," layer in color schemes (Alice chose "Sailboat"), and even choose from an array of typefaces. From there, you can leave the store on autopilot or pick which products you want to feature on the various categories' doors.
The cost to you: nothing. You get between 5 percent and 15 percent of each sale, which means pure profit from the first time your cash register rings. Of course, getting people to your site can cost you some serious money if you're truly serious, but if you stay away from Super Bowl ads and customize your store into a nice place people will remember, you still come out ahead. On the Vstore side, they just concentrate on what they do best: getting in a ton of merchandise and improving their store-building tools. With both sides taking care of business, who knows, maybe this will be the way to successful e-commerce for many small companies.
So what's the catch? The first would be Vstore's viability long term. Vstore is backed by CMGI, an investment umbrella corporation that has been saddled with a lot of failing dot-coms. And so far, it has more than 1 million products ready to go, but with so many dot-coms failing, Alice would never predict the longevity or likelihood of any company these days. The good news is with no investment needed on your part, it doesn't hurt to set up your own store and take a crack at being a virtual merchant on your lunch break. At the least, you can buy from your own store and treat yourself to a nice discount. Pricing overall, Alice found after doing some store-by-store comparisons, was on the midrange side. You'll definitely find cheaper places out there, but overall, the Vstore platform is robust, nicely stocked, and fairly priced.
Alice rarely writes so positively about any company, but free technical things that cost other people millions is like having the last laugh "Hard Edge" style. So check out Vstore and become your own merchant. Even if you never make a dime, at least you'll be in good company and out far less pocket money than Mr. Bezos.
If you want to check out Alice's test store, try alicestore.vstoreelectronics.com.
Bill's crystal ball is still at the urologist, so it's difficult to tell three weeks before its official introduction (in "Hard Edge" time) whether the industry is taking the release of Intel's Pentium 4 as badly as it should. (If Intel's stock has dipped to around 30, it probably has.) There's a great opportunity here.
In the past, Bill has given AMD a hard time for its lack of innovation. Let's face it, the company's chip strategies have kept it in Intel's shadow even during those times when it initially beat Intel to the punch.
Now, however, with Intel seemingly incapable of doing anything right (do Pentium-based computers support DDR SDRAM yet?), this is the time for AMD to step in with something new and incredible, not just different and cheaper. (All right, it can keep the cheaper part.) How about a 1.8GHz (or faster) Athlon that will kick Intel's butt firmly and decisively (and not just in the minds of Athlonophiles) by proving you can brute-force your way through the FPU without resorting to new and unavailable programming routines, as Intel would have us believe is the case for SSE2?
How about a 2GHz Athlon that's priced such that you could buy a system with a 60GB hard drive, the latest and greatest graphics card (more likely than not something with an nVidia chip on it for 3D), DVD/CD-RW drive, great sound and speakers (Dolby 5:1, of course) and a 19-inch monitor (which Alice and Bill are declaring the new standard monitor size for the digital age) for less than $2,500 on the very first day the CPU is available? That would be a hoot. It can be done.
When Bill's next-door neighbor asked for a recommendation about a system that would handle digital movie editing and creation, it was with a heavy heart that Bill recommended the iMac DV Plus. Sure, when Bill started his career (many years ago) he did so by focusing on Apple products. Two of the six books Bill wrote were about Apple computers (the IIc and the Macintosh). But that romance ended in 1985 as Macs became ponderous and overpriced, and PCs were beginning to become downright bargains.
So what's changed to make Bill cut even this small inroad? Apple has done something very smart over the years, and it's finally paying off. The core features it wants for its computers are integrated on the motherboard. Normally, Alice and Bill are very much opposed to that and, in general, they still are. But if you look at something like FireWire, which on the PC has become less than a second-class citizen in favor of pokey old USB, that strategy can pay off big time.
Why do PCs need FireWire? They need the speed. USB won't cut it for 30-fps digital streaming video no matter what platter they try to serve it to you on. "But there are FireWire interface cards available," you cry. Yes, there are, but with minor exceptions, they're hit-or-miss propositions with the capability of causing resource-hogging complications. If that does happen, fingers point all over the place. You put FireWire on the PC's motherboard, you make the BIOS responsible for managing it, and you get rid of all of the angst in one swell foop. Hats off to Apple for taking the lead (again?) in bringing new technology to the consumer without the need for an accompanying packet of lubricant.
If you haven't wished Alice and Bill a happy hundredth "Hard Edge" by sending them an e-mail or even a card, shame on you! Luckily, it's a brand-new year, and you can start things off fresh by sending Alice and Bill a fine rant or comment of a technical nature. Alice has been pleased by all the mail she's been getting now that she controls the e-mail address, so please keep the kind words and comments coming.
"The Hard Edge"
Computer Shopper
28 E. 28th St., 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10016-7922
hardedge@zdnet.com
Alice and Bill's Resolutions for the New Year
1. Install Windows Me on every 600MHz or faster system and play a lot of Spider Solitaire.
2. Put a few 60GB or 70GB drives online in the BofD&PC in anticipation of Matrox's Marvel 450 card.
3. Get a DVD-RAM drive.
4. Hack into TiVo and upgrade the available record time to 200 hours.
5. Find one meaningful use for a Web-enabled cell phone.
6. Wash the Corvette.
7. Keep making fun of Intel until it starts doing things right again.
8. Finally get a Web site for "The Hard Edge."
9. Upgrade to all gigahertz devices—phones, CPUs, and so on.
10. Dump AOL account.