I had a chance to catch up with Peter Coffee, who recently ended his 18 years at Salesforce to focus on philanthropy and pro bono consulting. I first met Peter in the mid-1980s, when he was working for a defense contractor in IT, and I had just left working for an insurance company’s IT department. Both of us were living in LA and both of us were part of the advance guard of installing PCs around our companies. I had taken a job with PC Week, writing my little corporate IT heart out, and I had just hired Peter to be part of a team of product reviewers and in-house analysts.
Back in those days, there were many different PC makers, each running a slightly different collection of hardware and operating system. MS DOS, the Microsoft version, hadn’t yet become a standard, and there were also other operating systems that have since either died (like CP/M) or have morphed into major big deals (like the early versions that became Linux). Peter recalls one debate that he had in person with Bill Gates in those early years, where he argued that MS DOS might be the technically superior product, but other DOS versions put more tools in the box. Those were the days where you could buttonhole Gates in person.
Before we came to PC Week, Peter and I would examine these products and make recommendations to our corporate user base and management about which ones would become the company standard. Given that both of our companies were huge IBM customers, you might think that IBM had the PC world locked up, but this wasn’t always the case.
Peter and the rest of my team at PC Week Labs were early to do product reviews and write about the issues that we saw in terms of our corporate context. “We created an entire new way of breaking news by doing tech investigations and analysis. We would write short pieces that were published the following week, originating this content from our technical backgrounds,” he said, giving me credit for creating this journalistic model that has since flourished and now seems in decline. We also did numerous stunts, such as testing which network topologies were actually faster (Ethernet) and why early Windows was a bust (it ran on top of DOS rather than replacing it) or about the 386 CPU. They were heady times, to be sure. It was a model that I brought over to Network Computing magazine, which I began in the summer of 1990.
Peter reminded me that many tech pubs — including most of the overseas ones — had a pay to play model, where the writers would offer up glowing reviews of the products of the major advertisers. What we did was having strong opinions and having the technical chops to back them up.
But times have changed. Now everyone is familiar with PCs, and takes them for granted. You don’t need a degree in Computer Science to be able to program, “because computer literacy is more about thinking about a problem than learning how to write code,” as Peter told me. “It is about finding the right tool to do the job, and assembling connections and anticipating the questions and problems that lie in the future. That has changed the whole notion of technical expertise into tying data sources and algorithms and understanding what the ultimate user wants to know.”
Several years ago, Peter and his wife started a non-profit foundation that will occupy their full-time attention. The foundation will focus on funding local efforts to improve climate, STEM education and other matters. His goal is to bootstrap these efforts into a better position to obtain national or international support. He said, “These are problems that could exponentially bloom into major issues, but they need help when they are still small and solvable.” I wish them well.
