Windows NT Moves Into Apple’s Core

Years ago, desktop publishing was born on the Mac. Without the Mac interface, we wouldn’t have one of computerdom’s goofiest and most venerated acronyms: WYSIWYG, for “what you see is what you get,” the foundation of reasonably usable desktop publishing.

That was then. Nowadays, Microsoft is circling, vulture-like, around the profitable publishing realm, positioning Windows NT--Windows 95’s more powerful sibling--as the publishing platform of the future. That’s a sobering prospect; if Apple loses publishing, kiss your Mac goodbye.

Whereas Windows 3.1 and 95 were triumphs of marketing, NT is trying to compete on the basis of quality and power. Could NT’s parity with the Mac OS in publishing, like objects in your car’s side mirror, be closer than it appears?

In the last year, NT has matured greatly as a publishing platform. Key applications, such as Illustrator, FreeHand, Photoshop, Pagemaker and QuarkXpress, now offer feature-equivalence on NT and the Mac. And with the new Adobe Type Manager for Windows, fonts on NT are finally approaching Mac standards.

In an effort to mimic the Mac’s superior integration and reduce the pain of using NT, some system vendors--including Intergraph and Mac-clone maker Umax--are providing a full line of turnkey NT publishing systems, pre-installed with top-flight software.

All of this appeals to the publishers who need powerhouse NT features that the Mac lacks, including:

* Preemptive multi-tasking, for running several applications simultaneously without taking a big performance hit;

* Memory protection, to prevent an application freeze from crashing your system;

* Multi-threading, for mind-boggling speed boosts on machines with multiple CPUs.

It’s a ferocious mix. Just ask Apple. “NT has won the server battle,” says Jeff Martin, Apple’s senior director for publishing and design.

Martin is talking about publishing servers--the powerful computers that manage print jobs, track shared layouts and render huge 3-D files, among other things.

Apple sees servers based on its Rhapsody OS (which will eventually offer NT’s high-end features, plus other advantages) as complementing NT servers in a mixed environment of PCs and Macs.

“Our job is to be the best client for any server,” says Martin. Should he fear NT will overtake the Mac as a client or as the main machine for all professional publishers?

Apple says no, and not just because the Mac OS is easier to use than NT. The Mac retains superiority in a wide range of areas that most publishers, designers and multimedia artists can’t live without, including:

* Color. Apple’s ColorSync matching system--designed to ensure reasonable fidelity between scanner, screen and output--has no competition on today’s NT. (NT 5.0, due sometime next year, will narrow the gap, but Apple should keep an edge.)

* Diversity of software. A multitude of tools--plug-ins for special effects, custom fonts and utilities and shareware programs that seem to solve problems as soon as they emerge--give the Mac all kinds of highly specialized capabilities.

* Service. Publishing service bureaus understand the Mac better, which means more accessible and efficient trouble-shooting on complex jobs.

* Hardware support. Unlike NT, the Mac allows the use of two monitors simultaneously and offers plug and play for just about every printer, scanner and monitor you would want. The Mac’s support for PostScript, Adobe’s ubiquitous page-description language, puts NT to shame. In publishing, error-free PostScript processing is the coin of the realm.

* Speed. I’m still waiting on independent testing comparing the new G3 Macs with fast NT boxes, but available evidence suggests that Apple has the hottest single-CPU publishing boxes on the market.

I don’t expect NT--or even Rhapsody--to catch up with the Mac OS in some of these areas for years, and so far the market agrees. According to Computer Intelligence Infocorp, a market research firm, even though the Mac’s market share in publishing is eroding, so far this year, 51% of all professional publishing software was sold for the Mac, compared with 15% for Windows 95 and far less for NT. And on average, Mac users work on desktop publishing many more hours per week than do PC users.

So despite Apple’s high prices and habit of lurching from one ill-defined or poorly executed strategy to another, the Mac still dominates publishing. The industry can change rapidly, of course. But if Apple can win anywhere, it will win in publishing.

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Charles Piller can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]