Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

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sdmicro
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Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by sdmicro »

Why Did The QL Fail In Business?

On paper, the QL looked great. Nice, sleek black professional styling, twin “fast-access” data drives built-in and four main applications included in the price. Add a powerful programming language modestly named “SuperBasic”. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, we all know the dramas of the botched launch and the negative press which enveloped the machine. Then there were the infamous Sinclair delays. Yet there are other reasons why the QL failed in the business market. Credibility was the main one. £399 seemed a good price for a “32bit” state-of-the art micro but adding a monitor and printer meant spending another £500 or more. The keyboard was functional enough but not of good enough quality for a fast typist. And the microdrives? I can hear an office manager asking a consultant if he seriously expected him to store precious data on a tiny cartridge tape. And in 1984/5 disc drives were large and expensive. Remember the Quest range?

Thus the company market was out-of-bounds to the QL from the start. This left the small, home business to aim at which was the sector I catered for with my accounts packages. The one-man band who did his books in the back room and was fed up with using pen, paper and calculator. This type of user was likely to adopt a home computer to do his invoicing and VAT returns. He or she would be prepared to put up with a portable TV to keep costs down and expansion would be a gradual process if the system proved its worth. The QL attracted quite a few people in this category but never enough to create a viable small business market. The truth is, by late 1985, a new machine appeared which attracted such users in the tens of thousands. It wasn’t an IBM compatible which was still far too expensive for the home professional. No, it was the Amstrad PCW 8256, a complete all-in-one system with monitor, disc drive, keyboard and printer. The software provided was quite comprehensive as well, there was LocoScript* a fully-fledged word processor and CP/M the venerable operating system. The PCW used ‘obsolete’ 8bit technology but buyers didn’t care, it did the job and cheaply @£399, the original QL price. By 1986 the PCW was selling like the proverbial hotcakes and the QL was sitting in Dixon’s bargain bin being bundled with a thermal printer @£150. And Sinclair, in deep trouble, were bought out by Amstrad of course. The QL went on to achieve cult status with a very loyal user base but the business dream was over.
I should declare an interest here since I took over LocoScript Software but that wasn’t until 1999.

Could it have been different? Perhaps if a QLII had appeared early on with more memory and a disc drive. The klunky keyboard and the need to add a monitor might have been forgiven but the microdrives were never fast or reliable enough. [Having said that, my company kept its accounts on the QL for several years, with plenty of backups, and never lost any important data] I always liked Quill and thought it was a very logical word processor which was quick and easy to use but it couldn’t handle large documents. Archive was a disaster waiting to happen if a file didn’t get closed. Abacus was quite a decent spreadsheet. And the QL had its business successes. A man who became a great friend of mine was a baker on the east coast. I customised a standard accounts package to handle all his production runs, delivery notes, invoicing and statements. This saved him many hours of work every week. No wonder I was greeted with a large brandy and sent away with a huge tray of treats, bread, buns and cakes. Happy days! He upgraded his QL with Miracle twin 3.5” drives, colour monitor, PC-style external keyboard and fancy printers. And when he moved on to a PC in the early 90s he wanted me to reprogram the system in MSDOS as it was so useful. Another customer used our QL Invoicer to bill Forte hotels for his consultancy work. He was also a famous MC in Victorian Music Hall and invited us up to London for shows. Colourful people, QL users. The late, great Bill Richardson stocked my software for a while, persuaded to do so by Felix Fonteyn, brother of Dame Margot, the ballet dancer. What a hard bargainer Bill was. A true businessman. I also knew Peter Chambers of GAP Software, producers of Front Page the first DTP for the QL. We shared a stall at a ZX Microfair. Richard and Julie Turner of the ambitious QL Super User Bureau were nice people, too. However, like many QL personalities, they all disappeared suddenly. The limited market couldn’t sustain them. PDQL and CST, makers of the Thor series, went the same way. Mostly owing money.

When QL World went under for the last time in 1994 it must have seemed unlikely there would ever be another major magazine but QL Today was a brilliant successor. What a great job Jochen, Dilwyn, Geoff, Bruce and others did on this. I caught up with issues late on but the amount of business coverage was virtually zilch. There were never any stories of commercial users battling against the odds and still using their QL in business. This is not down to the publishers – there were just no such articles to print. Which kind of proves the point – that the QL was always a hobbyist’s machine and never really a business computer.


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Re: Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by 1024MAK »

@ sdmicro - did you ever see the university study into Sinclair's (after launch) market survey for the QL?
I think a link to it is somewhere on this forum.

Mark


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Re: Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by dex »

1024MAK wrote:@ sdmicro - did you ever see the university study into Sinclair's (after launch) market survey for the QL? I think a link to it is somewhere on this forum.
https://sites.google.com/site/ql68kos/home/about-ql, the second file bellow.


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Re: Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by sdmicro »

1024MAK wrote:@ sdmicro - did you ever see the university study into Sinclair's (after launch) market survey for the QL?
I think a link to it is somewhere on this forum.

Mark
No, I haven't read that piece but will certainly look for it, should be very interesting.

Steve.


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Re: Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by chriskgnr »

The open university study for the QL, is a good reference about the QL failure. Too many truths in this text. ;)


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Re: Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by sdmicro »

chriskgnr wrote:The open university study for the QL, is a good reference about the QL failure. Too many truths in this text. ;)
For anyone else who is interested (apart from me) the link to this report in pdf form is here>


http://www.cowo.ch/downloads/SinclairQL ... g-SQPP.pdf


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Re: Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by lostcarpark »

I think all of the problems you mention, the launch, the delays, the microdrives, the problems adding monitors and printers, were symptoms rather than the underlying cause of the QL's (relative) failure.

The real problem was that Sinclair never understood that you can't treat the business market like the hobby/enthusiast market.

Business users need a system that works day after day, and when something goes wrong, they need someone to answer the phone and tell them how to fix it. And if it's not working, they can't be without it for weeks, they need a replacement that afternoon.

From a technical viewpoint, perhaps they bit off more than they could chew with the 68k, and perhaps sticking with the Z80 they knew would have been safer. But while that might have avoided the production delays, I still think that without a business model that was acceptable to business users, whatever machine they produced would be doomed.

I think if Sinclair could have packaged a slightly costlier QL with a low cost monitor and printer, and sell the whole kit for £799, he would have a machine that undercut every business machine on the market in price, and had significantly better functionality than many machines costing several times the price.

And if he could have got the support right for business users, we might all be using machines derived from the QL today.

James


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Re: Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.

Post by sdmicro »

lostcarpark wrote:I think all of the problems you mention, the launch, the delays, the microdrives, the problems adding monitors and printers, were symptoms rather than the underlying cause of the QL's (relative) failure.

The real problem was that Sinclair never understood that you can't treat the business market like the hobby/enthusiast market.

Business users need a system that works day after day, and when something goes wrong, they need someone to answer the phone and tell them how to fix it. And if it's not working, they can't be without it for weeks, they need a replacement that afternoon.

From a technical viewpoint, perhaps they bit off more than they could chew with the 68k, and perhaps sticking with the Z80 they knew would have been safer. But while that might have avoided the production delays, I still think that without a business model that was acceptable to business users, whatever machine they produced would be doomed.

I think if Sinclair could have packaged a slightly costlier QL with a low cost monitor and printer, and sell the whole kit for £799, he would have a machine that undercut every business machine on the market in price, and had significantly better functionality than many machines costing several times the price.

And if he could have got the support right for business users, we might all be using machines derived from the QL today.

James
I think I did make the point that companies would not risk thier data to unreliable hardware and the microdrive was just too flimsy a storage device to instil confidence. And you are right James, Sinclair never provided a professional backup service. If they expected to compete in the commercial sector then this sort of support was essential.

As for the complete bundle, computer/keyboard, monitor and printer for £799. Yes this might have done better in business but then the Amstrad PCW came along and provided the lot for half this price. QL connoisseurs might sneer and regard the 8bit PCW as an unworthy competitor but it was just what the small/home business was waiting for.

In the end, it is doubtful that any machine could have withstood the assault of the PC/MSDOS/Windows platform which swept all before it. True, IBM/Microsoft did not in 1985 dominate the way it would do later but it's likely that the success of even a sorted QL would have been relatively shortlived. In the business world there is room for only one universal format. But wasn't it fun when so many systems were vying for supremacy?

Steve.


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