Media and Marketing Clive Simpkins
THE sanctions era is over; the “anything-goes-in-computing” mentality should be over too and responsible marketers of personal computers in South Africa should hasten to appoint an ombudsman for their poorly imaged industry.
Given the burgeoning need for personal computers among students, business people and small office, home office (Soho) users, there’s a fresh opportunity for every fly-by- night shyster to make a quick buck — particularly with the re-entry to South Africa of apartheid-averse computer manufacturers and with economists and Reserve Bank Governor Chris Stals predicting a respectable business year in 1995.
Here are three personal-contact experiences.
Case 1: A client buys a second notebook computer from a leading national outlet and requests the loading of newly purchased word processing programs before taking delivery, as well as a DOS 6,2 upgrade on existing and new machines. A slick salesperson assures the client a DOS upgrade-only will definitely not lose any data.
He doesn’t take into account the lazy support-service technician backstage, who interconnects (via Laplink) the two machines to save herself time and so blithely eliminates half of the client’s existing data files, which are later declared unrecoverable. Adding insult to injury, the new machine, mercifully not a gift, is found to have a sprinkling of the older machine’s data files.
Case 2: A client buys a state-of-the-art colour printer for Soho, guaranteed to be compatible with her existing desktop PC and software. On installing printer drivers, all looks hunky dory on screen — after all, WYSIWYG is supposed to mean “what you see is what you get”. In this case, the letters “a” and “j” attach themselves, when printed on paper, like inseparable Siamese twins. Months of yo-yoing to and fro between the different manufacturers of PC, printer and software has each blaming the other for the seemingly inexplicable incompatibility. The client says interconnected a’s and j’s have grown on her and she’s simply given up.
Case 3: I recently bought an Apple Power Macintosh with a view to producing better-than-usual graphics and newsletters. I knew Apple has a different operating system from IBM. I even understood that I’d need to buy a different version of WordPerfect. Imagine my chagrin, however, when a fast-talking technician set up the equipment and installed the software and only then casually mentioned that the Apple wouldn’t print to either of our three existing printers without a special interface. The best deal negotiable, we discovered, would add another R2 000 minimum to the existing, not inconsiderable, purchase price — kinda late when we’d already paid. We now have to “export” documents into an IBM-compatible machine in order to print them.
The PC sales and marketing industry in South Africa has earned a dreadful and seemingly justified reputation, which is going to get worse as demand and bad experiences mount. It’s time for concerned professionals to get together and appoint an ombudsman to whom discontented buyers can openly address their grievances, perhaps heralding a smidgen of respect and integrity to the silicon world of chips and chaff.
ARTS