Why Did The QL Fail In Business? A Reminiscence.
Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 1:07 pm
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.
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.
