◼ [III], The Lucky 13: What to Look for in Choosing Software, page [302].
5
The Select Word Processor: Martin Dean versus the Command-Driven Restaurants
“Gentleman Farmers” don’t appear just in whiskey ads. One showed up in InfoWorld—ballyhooing Select, a craftily marketed rival of WordStar.
Embracing Madison Avenue-style tactics, software companies like Select Information Systems were luring some customers away from programs that would have been far better for heavy-duty business use.
Select’s word processor retailed for about $500 in 1982, a year after its introduction, including speller and mailing list programs and a tutorial disk. Just WordStar—without accessory programs—listed for about the same.
More than twenty-five thousand copies of Select sold in less than two years, and major manufacturers started offering it with their computers. I myself loathed Select. And yet I could see how the program could wow the throngs jamming their local computer stores. The tutorial disk was a salesman’s dream: he could walk away while the program baby-sat the customer tinkering with the computer.
Select Information Systems, moreover, a forty-employee company in Kentfield, California, was running an advertising campaign as slick as any distiller’s.
“No contest,” proclaimed a San Francisco Examiner columnist in one ad in 1982, looking up from his Xerox 820, dangling a pair of glasses from his hand, like some refugee from a Famous Writers School. “Select was easier to learn.” The ads didn’t say what he was comparing it to, but a popular computer magazine named his equivalent of Brand X, WordStar.