Backstage: InfoWorld's movers and shakers

sk any InfoWorld veteran journalist -- past or present -- for a memorable moment on the job, and Bill Gates is likely to play a role. Jonathan Sacks, former InfoWorld editor in chief, recalls a particularly delicious incident back in 1985 when Bill Gates was seated at an industry awards dinner with Tom Casalegno, then publisher of InfoWorld.

"These two came from different worlds: Casalegno in fitted suit and polished shoes, and Gates uncomfortably in a tie," recalls Sacks, now senior vice president for programming operations at America Online, in Sterling, Va. "Gates was rocking as he does ... when the waiter came up and said, `Would you like the bisque or the salmon crepe appetizer,' to which Gates -- rocking ever faster -- replied, `Is one of those a liquid and one of those a solid?' Casalegno damn near spit his Manhattan all over the tablecloth!"

Then there was the year Microsoft's new Windows spreadsheet, Excel, was up against start-up Javelin Software's Javelin spreadsheet for InfoWorld Product of the Year. Although Excel was a beautiful extension of the existing spreadsheet concept, Javelin had imaginative features, says Michael McCarthy, InfoWorld reviews editor from 1984 to 1990 and current publisher of IDG's San Francisco-based Web Publishing Inc., producers of JavaWorld and SunWorld.

"I persuaded InfoWorld to give Javelin Product of the Year," McCarthy says. "At the InfoWorld dinner at Comdex, when they gave out the award for Product of the Year and Excel came in second, Bill Gates got up and stomped out of the room in front of everybody in a spectacularly rude manner."

Bob Metcalfe, former InfoWorld publisher and current Boston-based InfoWorld columnist, has his own Gates story.

"There was the time InfoWorld panned the new DOS 6.0, and Bill Gates called me to complain," Metcalfe says. "I told him I was publisher, and that he should be talking to editorial, namely Stewart Alsop, then editor in chief, over which -- because of strict separation of church and state at IDG -- I had no influence on such matters. Whew!"

Yet once in a great while vendors actually have shown gratitude -- not anger -- for critical reviews.

"Zenith had a PC product aimed at secretaries, and I think it got a 1.2 score," McCarthy says. "[Our] publisher found himself in their office on the day it came out -- looking for advertising. He went in to a meeting with great trepidation, and they said, `Thank you, we all thought this was a terrible product and it was shoved down our throats.'"

Testing the latest and greatest has thrust many an InfoWorld journalist into the spotlight.

"I remember being holed up in a tiny Manhattan hotel room in the spring of 1987, pulling together our coverage of IBM's PS/2 and OS/2 announcement," says Michael J. Miller, then InfoWorld's executive editor of technology, and current Ziff-Davis executive vice president/ editorial director and editor in chief of PC Magazine, in New York. "We spent hours one evening at IBM headquarters looking at the machines, taking them apart, and then I wrote the First Looks [column]." "My favorite incident was showing up at the rollout of the PC-XT with an early NEC laptop -- aka the Radio Shack Model 100 -- and getting more attention from the press attending than IBM did," says John C. Dvorak, former InfoWorld editor and columnist, and now a columnist for PC Magazine.

Colorful characters also have provided noteworthy encounters for InfoWorld journalists. Maggie Canon, who was editor in chief from 1980 to 1983 and is now vice president of content at Foster City, Calif.-based Seybold Seminars, remembers the time Dave Carlick, then a zealous product manager, got up on her desk and started jumping up and down to convince her to cover a product that he was representing.

"I don't remember what the product was, but I do remember thinking the PC industry was really wild," Canon says.

My own unusual encounter came at a Quarterdeck party in Washington -- where I served as InfoWorld bureau chief -- following the late '80s Iran-Contra scandal. Therese Meyers, Quarterdeck president, wanted me to meet a DesqView developer who also was an avid InfoWorld reader, and I found myself shaking hands with John Poindexter, former national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the government, Poindexter got into high-tech, just like everybody else.

However, just as many memories have been spawned in times of crisis. Current Editor in Chief Sandy Reed remembers being at the center of the month-long fire storm that erupted after her March 31, 1997, column.

"I nullified the results of the Readers Choice poll and accused OS/2 `zealots' of ballot stuffing," Reed says.

Word of the crumbling IBM-Microsoft alliance that had created OS/2 caused InfoWorld editors to actually stop the presses in August, 1990. Sacks and Alice LaPlante, then news editor, had confirmed the first key details of the divorce and, within 2 hours, rewrote the story and transmitted it to the printer, says Rachel Parker, who had just taken on the news editor position at the time.

"What followed was torture," Parker says. "Sacks took the calls from Pam Edstrom [from Microsoft's public relations agency] and a few Microsoft executives, who were practically reaching through the telephone to wrestle us. She threatened to pull advertising, tried to cajole us out of the story, screamed that we were wrong, asked for our sources' names -- the whole 9 yards. We stuck by the story and, later in the year, IBM and Microsoft did indeed announce the dissolution of their partnership."

Editorials also caused their fair share of vendor clashes. Stewart Alsop, former editor in chief and now a venture capitalist at Menlo Park, Calif.-based New Enterprise Associates, wrote an editorial calling a 12-page Compaq ad opposite his editorial "hogwash."

"Because this was a clear violation of the separation of state and church, I had to take a red-eye to New York to apologize, and give a $100,000 make-good [ad] to Compaq's ad agency," then-publisher Metcalfe says.

To preserve that editorial integrity, other InfoWorld publishers have had to throw their own punches as well. Alsop remembers an incident with Lotus when then-publisher Sacks stepped up to the plate. InfoWorld had published the very first review of Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows, which InfoWorld panned.

"[Sacks'] secretary came in to tell him that Jim Manzi from Lotus -- one of our biggest advertisers -- was on the phone and very unhappy," Alsop says. "Without missing a beat, Sacks picked up the phone and said, `Hey, Jim, what are you going to do about 1-2-3 for Windows?' He had a gleam in his eye. And you could almost hear Manzi choking apoplectically from the other side of the phone call. I loved that moment, because it contained everything that InfoWorld stands for: integrity, fun, attitude, courage."

Scott Mace (smace@ix.netcom.com) was a journalist at InfoWorld from 1981 to 1997. He currently is a free-lance writer in San Mateo, Calif.