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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (64044)	7/6/1999 10:27:00 AM
From: gnuman	Respond to of 132070

From the Economist, "A bad business " MOST of the geeks shoving their way into New York's Javits convention centre for last week's PC Expo saw only the usual cornucopia of computing delight. As always, the message of the PC industry's annual extravaganza was that everything is getting smarter, faster, cheaper. Never has the strength of Moore's Law—that computing power will double every 18 months—seemed to be more gloriously affirmed. Those prepared to look harder might, however, have seen the writing on the wall for PC makers. Though they will sell more machines in the next few years, 1999 may prove the high-water mark for revenues in the industry's American heartland. As for profits, even in today's market they are hard to come by—witness recent losses at Compaq, the word's biggest PC maker...... These low profits partly reflect overcapacity and competition for market share. But PC makers are also worried that the relentless cycle of upgrades, stoked by marketing and technology, is losing steam. The main cause is the Internet, the very phenomenon that many believed would be their greatest opportunity. Now, some Internet service providers (ISPs), such as America Online, are even giving PCs away.... But the real rebel against the tyranny that says PC owners must always upgrade is the Internet itself. Very little web content will require PC owners to buy new hardware; every new website will prolong the life of exsting hardware. Websites depend on attracting as many visitors as they can. Nobody would want to limit the appeal of their sites by designing them to work properly only on the fastest PCs. If users have spare money to devote to computing, they are more likely to spend it on increasing the bandwidth of their connection or on staying online for longer, both of which will benefit ISPs and cable operators rather than the PC industry. Although Dell says that people typically upgrade their PCs six months after getting a broadband connection, even today's cheaper PCs can cope with the fastest cable modems. Forrester's Eric Schmitt says that users are likely to spend whatever money they have left over on something that makes a difference, such as a snazzy flat-panel screen or a rewritable CD-ROM drive. What does all this mean for the PC industry? In a single word, pain. Internet computing will lead to lots of portable "thin clients" that will be inexpensive alternatives to laptops. Desktop PCs will remain competitive, but only because of their amazing cheapness. Less mature markets in Europe and Asia will absorb some of the overcapacity, but not for long. The same market dynamics apply there too: after all, the Internet is nothing if not global. economist.com

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (64044)	7/6/1999 10:42:00 AM
From: Mike M2	Respond to of 132070

Wayne, as Skeeter would say you are RAZOR SHARP I found another interesting passage from Robbin's book p.94 " If we are to understand the Continental point of view the significance of these facts cannot be overstated. Ever since the war ( WWI), the British financial experts had been travelling around Europe saying to distressed Governments: " You must put up your bank rate and you must limit your fiduciary issue. Anything else is bad finance." And now when the British crisis arrived we were observed to do neither of these things. The bank rate was kept low and we raised the fiduciary limit. It is said that the circumstances were different, that the functioning of English institutions is exempt from the criteria which Englishmen frame for the judgement of other people's policy." reminds me of the SEA bubble and the US. Mike