Sinclair MD Defends the QL (Popular Computing Weekly, 28th June-4th July 1984)

Sinclair md defends the QL

SINCLAIR is planning an ambitious software publishing programme for the QL — over 50 titles before the end of the year.

Among the companies in discussions with Sinclair as well as Psion are Ouicksilva, Melbourne House, Ultimate and Picturesque. The company is also talking with a number of American software companies including Digital Research, Microsoft, Lotus, Software Arts and Ashton Tate.

“Obviously this software isn’t going to appear overnight — indeed the really good programs won’t appear until early next year.” said Sinclair managing director Nigel Searle. “The first QL’s went out only seven weeks ago and the machine’s processor is new to many of the houses involved.

Because of Sinclair’s current pricing policy on blank micro- drive cartridges (£3 each to the software houses) initial software releases for the QL will not be cheap. “The houses we have so far signed contracts with are mostly writing packages which sell for around £40, so the price of the blank cartridge is less significant,” said Searle.

“I wouldn’t disagree that the current cartridge price is too high — the software houses all think so. But we have to balance supply and demand.” At present Sinclair is producing over 100,000 cartridges a month but intends to increase production to over 40 million a year. Then Searle is confident the price will come down.

Also. Sinclair will soon announce the names of a number of independent software duplication companies which will manufacture Microdrive software.

The US version of the QL will go out with Microdrives although Nigel Searle did not completely rule out the possibility of fitting a disc drive. “Obviously we are not so arrogant a company that — if the QL were to be totally unsuccessful over there — we wouldn’t scratch our heads and maybe put in a disk drive.”

Searle is confident that the QL’s troubles are now past: “In some respects we got off to a bad start with the QL with its ‘dongle’ and production problems it was sometimes a little depressing. But while the press were jumping all over us we have been putting things right.”