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From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.rumor
Subject: Re: CCI Bought out????, competing with NBI
Message-ID: <2228@sun.uucp>
Date: Sun, 26-May-85 17:57:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.2228
Posted: Sun May 26 17:57:54 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 30-May-85 00:24:00 EDT
References: <180@cci-bdc.UUCP> <10760@brl-tgr.ARPA> <84@ritcv.UUCP> <183@nicmad.UUCP>
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> 	In the WSJ of last Friday there was an article stating that
> CCI is entering the word-processing business (NBI's turf).  Revenge?

The article was posted May 20th; I checked the May 17 Wall Street Journal
and the only mention of CCI was in "Business Briefs", discussing the annual
shareholder's meeting.  It said they sold a Power 6/32 to Lucasfilm for
"special motion picture effects".  Nothing about "entering the
word-processing business".

At this point, entering the word-processing business (as opposed to the
office automation business, which CCI has been in for the past couple of
years) is sort of like entering the plug-compatible business for large IBM
machines without 31-bit addressing; there may be some market but it's not
really growing.  Dedicated word processors are still being sold, but since
a dedicated word processor is just a microcomputer system which only has
text-editing (and maybe some simple database and report-writing) software,
most word processing systems are just word processing programs on
general-purpose computers.  You get something that's just as good as the
dedicated word processors *and* it can run 1-2-3, or Multiplan, or Unify,
or....  CCI has had a full-blown WYSIWYG word processor in their OA offering
for the past couple of years (either that or I spent the last two years at
CCI writing and extending something that doesn't exist).

NBI is also trying to expand into the general OA market; the merger with CCI
may have been intended to strengthen both companies' position in that
market.  If CCI cares about the pure typing-pool or one-or-two-machine
secretarial WP market, they're crazy; most of the big OA names are selling
large office computer systems and/or PCs (IBM, DEC, Data General, Wang, ...)
and that's what CCI's systems (both hardware and software) are like.

	Guy Harris