by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

I said that was nice. Then I noticed a look in his eye. It said, could I take a look at his setup, and maybe get him on-line again, before his e-mail box filled up and overflowed?

It said that, but it said even more. It reminded me of the look you see in the movies when the tribal chief brings his feverish child to the missionary's tent. The look that says, "Make it better with your white magic."

My friend's troubles -- we'll call him Larry -- went way beyond stacked-up e-mail. This past week the guy everyone thought was going to save Apple Computer, Gil Amelio, stepped down as CEO after a brief unsuccessful reign. Worse, Steve Jobs, the co-inventer of the Apple and project leader for the Mac, was seen waiting in the wings. Jobs, the 1980s poster child for nutzoid management, is not someone you want near a healthy company, much less one gasping for air.

Anyway, I told Larry upfront that I was no expert at Macintosh. Computer journalism doesn't reward writing about Macs. When only 10% of users use Macs, writing about Macs is like saying, "Readers, who needs 'em?"

This fact has caused me some grief over the years. Every time I wrote one of my patented whining complaint columns about some wretched upgrade experience with my IBMs, I was showered with e-messages from Mac users that were like that kid in The Simpsons whose only contribution to the world is laughing at other people's misfortunes -- "ha ha!"

The look at Larry's face told me that the little kid had stopped laughing.

It may be the turn of the Windows-Intel machine users to laugh. They've had to put up with smug Mac users for many years. When they asked why we bought a overly-complicated machine fraught with compatibility issues and wedded to an ancient, outmoded operating system, all we could say was, "Well, everyone else is using one."

The other reason, which would have been ruder to state, and which has been building steam the last two years, is that there is no guarantee that Apple will be around a whole lot longer. One day, Apple's "clear superiority" won't buy it another hour of life. And all the millions of people who constitute the Macintosh 10% will be plunged into computer orphanhood.

And if you think it's a drag to be an orphan as a child, it's much worse to be an orphan after 15 years of believing you'd been spared the computer anguish the rest of the world was suffering through.

On the financial side alone, it's a drag, after you've invested many years of learning, and thousands of dollars of investment, and gigabytes of data, to see a standard you knew was superior, backed up to a cliff and dumped into the sea.

I saw all that in Larry's look, but that was not all I saw. I looked deeper and saw a man crying out to another man for help. It was the look of a man so stripped of resources that he had to look to despised figures for assistance. Imagine the humiliation of the tribal chief handing his fevered child over to Bill Gates for help.

Last week Gates told Apple owners they nothing to fear from him. Microsoft would continue to be the good friend to the Macintosh standard it has always been. That was about as reassuring as seeing Steve Jobs prowling the Cupertino campus.

Logically, the tribal chief has no great reason to have confidence in the missionary, not after all the bitter words and deeds that have transpired between the two over the years. But where else can he turn? If the standard dies, what will they do? Learn Windows 95? It looks so hard.

And it must surely occur to Macintosh users now how close they came to winning the war. Macs were not priced to sell during the 1980s, usually costing half again as much as a comparably-powered IBM clone. Short-term pricing and licensing strategies, which lined the pockets of Apple shareholders then, while keeping the standard under firm control, are to blame for many of the problems Apple is experiencing now.

"The computer for the rest of us" never caught on beyond the small circle that could afford it, or were too technophobic to buy anything else.

In the end, after some futzing, dragging and dropping, I wasn't able to fix Larry's password. And there's precious little I can do about the other dark clouds gathering over his machine.

So I did what any friend would do. I gave him a hug, and left him alone with his machine, to cherish the sweet days remaining to them.

Michael Finley has just learned that Techno-Crazed, much of which appeared first in these pages, has been remaindered. Console Mike by writing him at mfinley@mfinley.com, or visit him at http://mfinley.com.