| "PnP will help us build our systems better, build them
more quickly, and have more confidence that they'll work
properly when delivered to the customer. Home users should
be able to buy an accessory, take it home, install it
themselves, and get it to work the first time. It will let
them expand their systems without fear." — Mark Clauder,
product manager for Compudyne products at CompUSA (Dallas,
TX), which operates 78 superstores throughout the U.S. "There's a crying need for PnP, no doubt about that. This is why the Macintosh is still popular, and why so many people who get their hands on a Mac never want to go back to a PC or Windows." — Carter J. Lusher, program director for personal computing, the Gartner Group (Stamford, CT). "PnP will probably eliminate about 20 percent of our [technical-support] calls, but we still get about 60 percent of our calls from people who don't understand much about the software of networking. We spend lots of our time helping people configure their software, like Windows for Workgroups or LANtastic. It's not really our problem, but you can't tell people that or they get really upset." — Fred Thiel, vice president of marketing and sales, Alta Research (Deerfield Beach, FL), manufacturer of the first PnP-ready ISA network adapter. "I certainly think a move away from the ISA bus would be a win, but our success is not gated by that." — Carl Stork, director of Windows hardware programs, Microsoft (Redmond, WA). "We will have full support for PnP in OS/2 at about the same time Microsoft does [in Chicago]. And we have a 32-bit operating system that's stable and has been out there for several years." — Lois Dimpfel, director of the Boca Raton Programming Center, IBM Personal Software Products. Copyright 1994-1998 BYTE |