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	Title: Why Business Products?
	Author: Paul DiLascia
	Source: The New Zork Times, v4(1)
	Date: Winter 1985
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

When the editor asked me to write an article explaining why Infocom has
ventured into business products, I thought: Hmmph. Why business
products, indeed! I could just as well ask, why *games*?

Nevertheless, this question often arises in the minds of Infocom fans
when they learn that Infocom — famous for its best-selling games,
producer of a whole genre of interactive fiction, and home of Floyd —
has now introduced Cornerstone, its first business software product.

They want to know what's going on. Business software? Does everyone
at Infocom now wear a blue pinstriped suit and read the *Wall Street
Journal* every morning? Have we finally lost our marbles — or maybe
we've transcended even ourselves? After all, business is serious, stuffy,
*boring*.

So I accepted the challenge, hoping to dispel some of these illusions.

We began developing Cornerstone in 1982, over two years ago.
Infocom's strategy all along was to compete in the business arena. We
just didn't tell anyone. We knew Infocom's software technology could
be applied successfully to business products as well as to games.

The games are sophisticated programs as far as software goes.
Writing a program that can respond intelligently to an arbitrary verbalization
is no easy task. Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Joel Berez
designed a special high-level language called ZIL (Zork Implementation
Language) and an entire development system just so they
could write large, complex game programs that would fit on small
microcomputers. It's this technology that gives Infocom an edge over its
competition.

A similar technology was developed to produce Cornerstone, our
new database system. It too is written in a specialized high-level
language, and it too is a very sophisticated program. Cornerstone
comprises over 75,000 lines of code. Some claim it's the biggest program
ever put on a single floppy disk. To write Cornerstone in assembly
language would be a Herculean task, not worth attempting by sane
mortals. As it is, it took a staff of programmers over two years to write
Cornerstone.

Cornerstone shares another important quality with our interactive
fiction. And that's its emphasis on *you*, the intrepid player (called, in
business circles, the *user*). Cornerstone makes you the architect of your
own database and allows you to manipulate information the way *you*
want. Cornerstone is designed for its users.

In developing Cornerstone, we've tried at every step to anticipate what
a sane (or insane) person might attempt to do next. There's a critical
difference, however, between Cornerstone and the games. While
the games strive to make life difficult — constantly thwarting your
best efforts, posing enigmas, even leaving you dead in some remote
wasteland — in Cornerstone, we've done everything we can think of to
make things easy. You'll never need InvisiClues to use Cornerstone,
because we've given it a HELP key which supplies hints and suggestions
that are so *apropos*, it's like having a wise friend always near.

<figure class="float-right-half">
<img src="/public/img/articles/nzt-why-business-products/brian-berkowitz.jpg" alt="Brian Berkowitz">
<figcaption><em>Brian "Spike" Berkowitz: "We pick the hardest thing to do — and then we
implement it."</em></figcaption>
</figure>

There are other differences, too. When people first play — I mean
use — Cornerstone, they sometimes ask why we didn't use a natural
language interface as in our games. The answer is this: Natural language
is inherently ambiguous, and ambiguity is just what you don't
want in a database. The equivocation that adds humor and wit to the games
would make Cornerstone a nightmare to use. If you told your
database "Show me all the letters from Fred," you probably wouldn't
be amused if it responded, "F, R, E, D." At Infocom, we believe in using
the right interface for the task at hand.

As to the claim that business products are dull, I point out in
defense that different people have different ideas about what's fun.
Some folks spends their time manipulating bits of information
they call "price-earning ratios" and "bond equivalent yields"; others like
to keep track of every last X-Men issue in their Marvel Comics
collection. Still others delight in comparing tasting notes for different
vintages of Mouton Rothschild. Judging from the early responses,
people like these will be pleased with Cornerstone. Some testers have
told us Cornerstone is what they've sought for years. Some even claim
it's fun!

At Infocom, *our* idea of fun is producing sophisticated, quality
software products that erode the barriers between people and computers.
It's what we do best. Cornerstone continues the tradition. That's why
we made it.

Yet I fear there remain some unsatisfied skeptics who continue to
wonder, "Why business products?" For them, I leave this quote from
Brian Berkowitz, one of the prime movers of Cornerstone: "We pick the
hardest thing to do — and then we implement it."
