No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
As people discover the large variety and low price of titles in the Mac mail-order catalogs, they stop even asking retailers at all. Retailers, seldom seeing Mac buyers coming in, either drop Mac products entirely or just stuff a few best-selling apps in the corner.
The same is true of peripheral hardware. The best prices for RAM, replacement hard drives, scanners and the like are in the catalogs, or occasionally at megastores like Computer City. So that's where they go.
But we are hurting ourselves by doing this. Little or no Mac presence in the mainstream outlets makes the new buyer think that there is no support for Macs anywhere, so they step right in line behind Gates&Co.
We can't fix this overnight, but when you want to buy anything for your Mac, always call at least three local outlets and ask them if they have what you seek. If they do, and the price is no more than 5% or 10% higher than mail order (including shipping), then by all means, buy locally. More money stays in the community, but most important is the fact that it's Mac money and the retailer gets the idea that Mac owners buy software. The reality is that a higher percentage of Mac owners buy a variety of applications and CD-ROMs than Intel owners (because the majority of installed PCs are located in offices and are used for one purpose only, between 8 and 5pm), but the perception is that there is no retail market for Macintosh products. In the CD-ROM area, some 40% of sales go to Mac users; pretty good for a platform with only a 9% share.
This is not all the catalogs there are, just the ones I receive regularly, but this is most of them. I deliberately left out Egghead Mailorder because they don't do very well in price or variety; it is the only catalog I toss upon arrival. Egghead Retail is attempting to change the layout of their stores and maybe they will offer a good Mac selection, maybe not. First one of the new stores is in Beaverton; you might check it out (I haven't.)
When I buy RAM, for myself or for a client, I always go to the places that specialize in it: Chip Merchant, (800) 426-6375 ext. 3; Memory Direct, (800) 486-2447; Techworks, (800) 704-0189. Check the ads in back of MacWeek (available to members in the PMUG office; another reason to join and support your local user group. See back pages for user group phone numbers.) or MacUser or Mac Home Journal. MacWeek is free and recommended as a source for all kinds of great mail-order deals, but it is hard to get and costs $100/year if you are not a network manager or consultant, or other insider (or a good liar).
I found Mac Home Journal to have more useful information per pound than any other monthly Mac magazine. It's not as easy to locate, so try larger magazine outlets.
Don't worry about buying mail order. Any company that messes with people gets the news spread onto the Internet in about a day, and they can watch sales drop off right before their eyes. It only takes a few disgruntled customers ranting on comp.sys.mac to cause real pain, so all bend over backwards to do a wonderful job. Fear will do that to you. It was the mail-order computer industry that got people away from the idea that ordered items take eight weeks to arrive; most places can FedEx stuff to you by the next day. Remember that the next time you call Victoria's Secret.
(2) I am not fond of their "PowerUser" house-brand SCSI devices, but I got my 7100/80 system (and two more like systems for a client) from them because at the time of buy they had the best price and the units in stock. (But don't get that system from them now; they want >$2499 for a unit that MacAttack has for $1750.)
(3) These two catalogs specialize in items for the printing, typesetting, graphics and publishing industry. They have items not found in the other catalogs.
(4) PC/Mac Connection combines Mac and PC catalog and is mostly PC oriented, few knowledgeable Mackers on staff. No separation of items so you waste time reading about products that turn out to be PC only. Most of these companies run a PC division, but keep them well separated.
(5) On the back page of the current (summer) catalog they offer a PowerMac 7100/80 8/700/CD for $3049.00. When I got mine in February it was $100 less; as of Aug. 8 you can buy this unit from the User Group Connection, M*, and also MacAttack, PM* (no catalog) for $1750.00. (He almost bought the same unit from ClubMac for $2499.) UGC is available to members of any Mac User Group, and MacAttack, (800) 299-6227, advertises in MacWeek. They are a tiny company, so don't call unless you are ready to buy and want to see what they can do.
(6) Image Club specializes in clipart, CD-ROMs and fonts, with a handful of graphics applications in stock.
(7) Voyager sells expanded books (hypertext) and CD-ROMs. No peripherals at all. They also publish CD-ROMs and have a large line of laserdisks.
(8) This company specializes in educational programs and CDs. They carry the Voyager catalog, and sell site licenses for many packages. They have stuff for Mac/DOS/Windows and even Apple II.
(9) Well, you gotta get away from the computer sometime. These "outfitters of popular culture" will sell you an assortment of rubber rodents, roaches, inflatable Scream, useless toys, fighting nun puppets, squeezable hearts and other wonders. Add to your Must-Get list.
Well, the source of those statements is lost to history, but the fact is that even PageMaker 5.1 had a secret upgrade available to multi-platform environments that used OLE, and the plan was to use it in version 6.0 all along.
She states that the reason for this is the cross-platform capability of PageMaker needs OLE to work effectively. When it is running, a properly-filenamed (eight_3.PM5 for example) can be opened from a server regardless of whether the user has a Mac or Wintel box.
Since the Adobe takeover of Aldus, certain unplanned features were spooged into the program, including the ability to create HTML code from a PM6 page, and to export directly to Acrobat format. These also call the OLE Library, but not the extension.
The good news is that PM6 for PowerMac can run without the OLE extension, although it does need the OLE Library and other parts, which are loaded from the CD during the Install. The bad news is that the 680x0 version of PM6 will not run if the OLE extension is missing.
She also states that OLE was chosen because OpenDoc was not in a sufficiently finalized form to do the job. It is possible that, but she will of course not commit to state, version 7.0 will use OpenDoc in lieu of OLE. As a superior alternative it is likely a done deal, but if OpenDoc is not finished and functional as expected, then we are stuck with OLE for good.
We already found out that Microsoft Works requires the OLE extension to run; it is fortunate that Word 6.0.1 does not.
If it is your goal and intention to preserve your hard drive as a Microsoft-free zone, then there is this little page-layout software company out of Denver that you need to talk to...
No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)