It's a Mac thing - still - Editorial

Publishers are from Windows, editors are from Mac. If that doesn't sum up the most central relationship on a magazine, you haven't been in the business very long.

You know that PCs are built to run spreadsheets and do mega-document processing for text- and chart-heavy professions that involve the law, government and space exploration, while the more expensive Mac is made for the less-well-compensated among us: writers and designers. The recent news that Apple Computer's founder, Steve Jobs, having resumed to rescue the company he once made great, has accepted $150 million from arch-rival Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, makes the analogy even more poignant.

Our annual desktop trends survey (page 52) bears me out. Once again, almost half the editorial departments in the business and nearly 90 percent of the art departments remain dependent on Macintosh hardware. (We don't survey computer-purchase trends of the upper echelons. We don't have to. Even though the vice presidents-and-up have computers in their offices, many of those machines just gather dust until someone even higher up says, "Didn't you get my e-mail?")

But the desktop revolution--as it was hailed back when publishing companies were shoveling money into the Macintosh maw--has become a much quieter desktop evolution. QuarkXPress 4.0 is bound to capture more of the art department's budget, thanks to its new design tools, but overall, publishers today are warier of spending big bucks to invest in software, whether new or an upgrade. The average outlay for such purchases is reported to be less than $15,000, compared to new-software budgets averaging $48,000. Digital advertising delivery and computer-to-plate technology have been heralded for years (especially in these pages), but today they don't seem much closer than the horizon.

Fulfillment is another side of publishing that is embracing new technology. We asked circulators and fulfillment companies how they are planning for the future, and found they're hot-linking to customers' Web sites all around the industry. Fulfillment companies themselves are testing systems--finally!--that will deliver the first issue of a magazine subscription within a few days, not a few weeks, of receiving an order.

Our industry's thirst for bigger-better-faster systems seems unquenchable. But I predict that you still won't find many voice-recognition computers in the editorial department 20 years hence--even if upper management gets its e-mail that way. As a journalist noted recently on National Public Radio, "I'm so used to typing my stones, I think with my fingers."

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