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June 5, 1999
News
- The big news for the coming week will be the official launch of Microsoft’s Office
2000 software suite for Windows-based PCs on Thursday, June 10. This is the first major
revision of the suite since Office 97 and there are several important changes that have
been made, although some of the most important ones have to do with how the suite is
packaged. Office 2000 will come in four different varieties: Office 2000 Standard, which
retails for $499 for new users and $249 for upgraders, includes four applications: your
basic Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Office 2000 Small Business Edition, which also
retails for $499 for new users and $249 for upgraders, includes four applications as
well—Word, Excel, Publisher and Outlook—plus what Microsoft is calling a set of
Small Business Tools. These tools include the Small Business Customer Manager, which works
in conjunction with third-party accounting applications to link customer information with
their financial records; Business Planner, which provides a Wizard-like interface to help
build a business plan and create basic business documents; Direct Mail Manager, which
helps you create and distribute a direct mail mailing; and Small Business Financial
Manager, which is an Excel-based tools that helps you do basic what-if scenarios. Office
2000 Professional Edition, which costs $599 for new users and $349 for
upgraders, includes
six apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access—as well as the
Small Business Tools. Finally, the top-of-the-line Premium Edition, which costs a whopping
$799 for new users and $449 for upgraders, includes all that’s in the Professional
Edition plus the company’s FrontPage 2000 web authoring program and their relatively
new PhotoDraw 2000 image-editing and drawing program. All versions of the suite also come
with Internet Explorer 5.0 on CD-ROM, which can save you the hassle of downloading it. In
each case, if you’re upgrading from a previous Microsoft Office Suite you can save an
additional $40 (or $50 in the case of Office Premium) via an in-the-box coupon. I plan to
go into some of the specific features available in each of the applications more next
week, after I’ve had a chance to use them a bit, but the overall benefits provided by
the suite include: the ability to save all files in HTML format, with formatting intact;
self-repairing applications in the event a critical file is somehow damaged or
overwritten; the ability to cut up to 12 different items before you have to paste any of
them; and menu personalization, which annoyingly changes where and what features are
located on a particular menu.
- Microsoft’s WebTV subsidiary unveiled new versions of their Classic and Plus WebTV
boxes this week. Both units, which are still priced at $99 and $199 respectively, are
set-top boxes that let you send and receive e-mail and visit web sites through your
television. Enhancements to the new versions include faster internal processors, more
memory and smaller boxes. In fact, the Classic version is now the size of a portable CD
player. In addition, the Classic version now includes a 56K modem, like the Plus version,
as well as a built-in printer port. The big change on the Plus version is that it no
longer has a hard drive, which keeps the device quiet. The monthly service costs for the
new devices will be $21.95 and $24.95 respectively. In addition to the new devices, WebTV
announced service upgrades to be available later this summer to all of its existing and
new WebTV customers. Among the new features are the ability to build a simple home page,
redesigned search features and a redesigned home page.
- Diamond this week cut the price of their Rio MP3 portable digital audio players from
$199 to $169. In addition, through the end of July, the Rio comes with a coupon for an
additional $50 rebate. The Rio can play any music in MP3 format that you download from the
Internet onto your PC and then transfer over to the tiny, handheld device.
- Iomega this week announced a tiny new storage device called the PC Clik drive. Based on
their existing external Clik drives, which can store 40 MB of data onto a tiny cartridge,
the new PC Clik drive comes in PC Card Type II format and works with most notebooks that
include PC Card—sometimes also called PCMCIA—slots. The $199 device, which will
be available in the third quarter of this year, gets its power and data connections from
the PC Card slot, so there are no additional pieces required. You can purchase additional
Clik disks that slide into the drive for about $10/piece in quantity.
- Hewlett-Packard introduced several new printers this week. Probably the most interesting
one, at least from a marketing perspective, is the new "Barbie" printer
that’s part of the company’s low-cost Apollo line of printers. The $79 Apollo
P-1220 Barbie Printer, which is light gray with pink highlights and comes with Barbie
stickers that you can put on the printer itself, offers the same specs as the other Apollo
1200 printers. These include 600 dpi resolution, a parallel port connection, CMY color or
black printing (but not true four-color printing) and print speeds of up to 3.5 ppm for
black and 1.5 for color. In addition, however, the printer also comes with the Barbie
Magic Hair Styler CD-ROM. If you’re looking for a more traditional printer, you may
want to check out HP’s new 610, 612 and 812. The $99 610 features true four-color
printing, as well as support for photo printing with the purchase of a $32 Photo Ink
cartridge, a parallel port connection, and print speeds of 4 ppm for black and 1 ppm for
color. For $30 more, the 612 raises the print speeds to 5 ppm for black and 2.5 ppm for
color and includes greeting card software. The $199 812 features both USB and parallel
connections for working with Macs or PCs, support for HP’s PhotoReT II technology,
which can blend multiple inks on a single dot for better color quality, and print speeds
of 6.5 ppm for black and 4.5 for color.
- Apple this week updated the speed of their Bondi Blue Power Mac G3 line of computers.
The low end configuration, whose prices still start at $1,599, jumps from a 300 to a 350
MHz G3 processor, the $1,999 mid-range systems jumps from a 350 to a 400 MHz processor,
and the $2,519 high-end system jumps from 400 to 450 MHz. Each of these systems come with
64 MB of RAM, a 6 or 12 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM, built-in USB and FireWire ports, a Rage
128 3D graphics card with 16 MB of memory, and standard 10/100 10Base T Ethernet
connections. None, however, include a floppy drive, serial port or SCSI connections.
Configurations with more memory, larger drives and/or a DVD-ROM drive are also available
and, as you would expect, cost more.
- Sony and HP recently debuted some of the first recordable DVD drives in the DVD+RW
format. Other companies have already shipped recordable DVD-RAM drives, but DVD+RW drive
companies claim that their format—which is incompatible with DVD-RAM—is
superior. They point out that while DVD-RAM requires a cartridge to hold a recordable
disk, DVD+RW does not. As a result, they say, future DVD drives should be able to easily
read DVD+RW disks, whereas it will be very difficult for them to read DVD-RAMs because of
the cartridge requirement. In addition, the capacity of DVD+RW is 3 GB, which is slightly
higher than the 2.6 GB capacity of current DVD-RAM drives. HP’s DVD+RW drive, which
is called the HP DVD Writer 3100i and is an internal device, features a SCSI connection
and lists for $699. It reads and writes DVD discs at about 1.25x, which would be similar
to about an 11x CD-RW drive.
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