CompuServe Messages

Jan: Maybe I'm jaded, but I'm frankly sick of all the hysteria, and the judgements about CDROM as a medium raised by our incredibly short-sighted trade press. >>two Senior Editors have written columns bemoaning the failure of CD-ROM to deliver on its promise.<< Anybody who says the technology is flawed because they found a bad publication is a bird-brain. Cinemania, for example, has some problems – errors of both omission and commission. MS has recognized and addressed this in public. Guess what! Every printed encyclopedia of film also suffers from similar errors! Is the printing press in big trouble because of sloppy fact-checking? I don't think so. Judith Krantz writes really bad books, a real waste of pulp, IMHO. But they sell, regardless of their quality. That's the nature of the business. I think we already have a police force. It's called the public marketplace. Some of the cops are people like yourself, who create and publish reviews – one person's opinion to help others evaluate new products. The judge and jury is the buyer. The fact that a product may be riddled with errors doesn't mean it's not better than its alternative. It may still be great. If people buy it, the publisher has the money to create a better pub which he/she can then sell again. If people don't buy it, the publisher goes into the donut biz! Probably the last opinion I would get excited about (positively or negatively) is a senior editor of a major pc magazine. I've yet to see any evidence that this class of consumer has even a clue about what CDROM is intended to do, or what its capabilities/impacts are. Keep up your work, you'll contribute more to the industry than those other guys, and be a real part of the process, not just an outsider trying to figure things out while the world passes them by. Best – Rich