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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richnorth who wrote (75948)	9/8/2001 4:58:33 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116753

Economy has contracted and worse is expected in next quarterly report (Japan) hmmmmm I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the tactic that I believe the western gov'ts are using is understating the situation and being upbeat. This method is employed with the belief that much of the suffering in an economic downturn is caused by people overreacting, i.e. tightening belts unecessarily, banks foreclosing too quickly and in general people panicking about the extent of the trouble. It is never worse than it actually is. In fact economic depressions are generally a time of creativity and industrial growth. The period of the greatest industrial growth in America was in the dirty 30's, not the roaring 20's. Henry Ford's Model A was the working man's car in in the mid 30's. Kinda strange when you think about deprivation and then associate it with the rise of the Automobile, bought by Mr. average Guy. Capital that flowed out in the 30's had good return. It had to make sure of that. Gone were days of free spending. But, finally, there is no question. It would appear that an economic shrinkage has (to) hit the US and Canada. There is absolutely no question it has hit Canada first in its resource sector and now in the tech sector. There are not many sectors left. All business I know of is down in Toronto. 2001 is the worst ever. When they won't steal Euros you know they are in trouble in Europe too. The conundrum is, that this is good news, not bad news. Everything had to contract. Dot Com Tulips had to fade. No business model. Just madness. And every technology on the net is wrong. People don't want to surf and shop unless there is something they really want to buy from somebody that they really want to buy it from where they can buy it with money they have in the bank. (Only 30% of people have credit cards.) Until that process is trusted and easy to do, you can forget the standard dreamed-up model of E-commerce. There is no advertising venue on the Internet. The interface is too slow and anemic and does not have the traffic. Ads have to work on volume. A broadcast layer is needed. (It started with the MBONE and was never revived because of choked last-mile bandwidth. This has changed a bit. A modified type of UDP may be needed) People have to "brand" when they see ads. They have to see and hear them lots. When they did get to a site it was obvious that the site had nothing to offer but a come-on. Regular business tipie-toed into the net and still has not got the flavour of it. Too little too late? Well they could still do it, but it takes doing by people who understand it. As was seen in Canada with Eaton's at the turn of the century, who alone understood the new mass retail market then, it cannot be expected that many will understand the methods. The world's worst internet site, just screamingly bad compared to the products and potential they have to offer is Hewlett-Packard. With their attitude you can easily see why they have lost 90% of their revenue in the past 2 years. Completely obfuscated site, smarmy slow download tech and hard to search and use. I would like to ram some of those garbage .pdf files you have to pay for to get info on HP products right up C. Fiorina's ass, but I will warrant it's too tight to take more than 2K. HP would do better with newspaper ads and telephone sales. But alas it's too late for HP and Compaq. They should have dropped their server line and HP_UX and went cheapo Intel-Linux. How could they miss Big Blue's move? Why is all this good news? Because as the dinosaurs die and the old guard's ideas are seen to be dead for the new leaner hungrier world, a new breed will step in and fill those needs. Unprecedented business opportunity. With the Bay Street-Wall Street sharks out of business and computer companies winking out like Christmas tree lights, people who can provide realistically priced service solutions can walk in and pick up the pieces. Nobody in small LAN world will pay 1000 a day for Unix experts or 150 dollars an hour for NT experts. Microsoft cannot deliver to vertical markets with its closed operating system. The tools are not there. Too expensive to develop. All MS has left is scare stories that are being seen as ever more untrue. Not that you cannot do anything with the MS system, just that its security model does not allow one to connect it to the Internet with any amount of satisfaction. Bob Young with Red Hat was right. He is positioned for growth. So are other Linux companies. The IT consultancy market has to get greatly simplified and much cheaper to survive. It was geared for a few (hundreds of thosuands) large specialized Big-Iron LAN's. (Remember Netware?) To move into smaller, more diverse LAN's, in the millions in numbers, a different model of support is needed. (there are 5 millions Unix seats deployed today approximately, not counting Linux. Within 5 years half of those will be Linux.) All Unices and database things are overpriced for the small LAN anyway. A community model is needed. Who is going to pay 400,000 to buy and install a 50 computer system and 100,000 for its Oracle database plus 150,000 for installation/population? And pay 200 dollars an hour for experts whom you have to call once a week? With Linux you can do it for 150,000 and pay 50,000 for the entire database and installation. And journaled file systems and mission critical too, or Canadian National Railways would not do it. The downshot is that there is as usual good news and bad news. The good news is that this post has ended and you don't have to think about it anymore. The bad news is that if you don't take advantage of the opportunity in this perhaps 5 year downturn, you will be out of a job very soon. Depressions last, in and out, 15 years. The last one was from 1929 to 1944. But the worst was over for the low end by 1937. Then there was another one in 1948! See you in 2008. If you are smart, by then you will be rich. EC<:-}