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Technology Stocks : PC Sector Round Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pierre-X who wrote (55)	3/19/1998 9:29:00 PM
From: Yogi - Paul	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 2025

PX, <<A. In five years PC penetration will exceed 75% of all U.S. households. 50% of the U.S. will be on line. B. In ten years PC penetration will exceed 90% of all U.S. households, and the average number of PCs per household will exceed 1.>> I am afraid we are in sharp disagreement. As a reformed long-haired, moccasin wearing, placard waving, loud mouth liberal, it pains me to type these words. A failed educational system in the US has effectively destroyed the potential of 20% of the population. They will never display the curiosity necessary to think about using a PC. Hell, I would be stunned if more than 80% of the population has read more than 3 books in a lifetime. A further 15% of the population may have the desire to learn or try new things but are so crippled by an early lack of basic education that they are incapable of operating a basic terminal. Throw in another 5% who are capable and curious but economically disadvantaged. Leaves you with 60% possible penetration. Obviously these percentages are just opinion and are based on informal observation. By the way, now I'm a cigar smoking, scotch drinking, BMW driving, golf playing, capitalist pig. irthrifty

To: Pierre-X who wrote (55)	3/20/1998 11:51:00 AM
From: Robert Douglas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2025

Pierre Re: PC penetration and buying intentions. The last time I checked auto sales in the US were running around 15 million annually. Since it is generally accepted that there are about 110 million households in the country, that would put the buying rate just about half the 27% rate of expected PC buyers in the Harris Poll reported in "Business Week". You said "In five years PC penetration will exceed 75% of all U.S. households. 50% of the U.S. will be on line". I think you may be conservative unless future PCs allow for multiple users. Many households will undoubtedly have more than one PC in the house, just like I have 4 TVs, so we can all watch our own programs or not be confined to one room. I feel that the penetration rate will go well above one per household in the next 10 years. I came late to the PC table and I can give you the view from the great technologically unwashed masses. We have seen the future and the PC is it.

To: Pierre-X who wrote (55)	3/21/1998 5:43:00 PM
From: appro	Respond to of 2025

Survey says: >>Only about 2 percent of French households now have a computer and modem to connect to the Web, which purists insist on calling "la toile"--the French word for "web." But the number is growing daily.<< news.com from Mercury News: Posted at 8:51 p.m. PST Thursday, March 19, 1998 Opinion: Online surveys are meaningless BY DAN GILLMOR Mercury News Technology Columnist Please respond to the following survey question. Online polls are: a) Meaningless. b) Spinach. c) Hello. d) Quarks. e) Perhaps. It makes no difference to me, or to the usefulness of the result, which answer you picked, even though ''meaningless'' was closest to the correct response. Online polls, like call-in votes run by some radio stations and news organizations (including this one from time to time), are pretty much bogus. I bring this up because of a survey being conducted this week, with great fanfare, on the MSNBC Web site. It purports to measure attitudes on cybersex. Which reminds me -- it's time for another question in my own meaningless survey. Cybersex is: a) Not nearly as much fun as the real thing. b) Better than none at all. c) Not tonight, sweetheart; the server is down. Now, pollsters have gotten a somewhat bad name in recent years, for reasons not entirely their fault. We've seen the way political candidates conduct polls and then use the data to come up with positions on the issues. Incessant campaign-season polling seems to have deadened many voters' civic sensibilities -- after all, we begin to feel, why vote when you already know who'll win? And poorly designed polls cast public doubt on the entire profession. But survey research is a discipline with genuine roots in social and statistical sciences. Properly conducted surveys, querying random samples of a population with questions that aren't loaded to create a specific response, can tell us important things. A perfect survey includes everyone in the population you want to understand. The closest thing to that may be the Census ''long form,'' which goes to every sixth household every decade. Millions of responses, crunched by powerful computers, are the mother lode of who-we-are data without which our understanding of America would suffer. Time for another question. I fill out online polls because: a) They excite me. b) I get bored and restless if I have nothing else to do. c) I like parachute jumping. One of the most entertaining meaningless polls takes place every four years, when presidential candidates gather in Iowa for a cattle-call rally where Iowans cast ballots in the otherwise charming straw poll. Journalism organizations waste entire forests and mega-bucks worth of satellite time reporting the results. A straw poll -- the cybersex survey is just a high-tech version -- has no scientific validity except in the room where it's held. Participants are self-selected. The cybersex respondents, for example, aren't representative of the general public or even online users; they're only a sample of the online users who found out about the poll, knew how to find the Web site and then took the time to fill out the form. Because too many people don't understand that such a poll is basically bogus, it can influence opinions in the wider population. The dangers are obvious, yet people keep running and reporting these polls as if they meant something in and of themselves. By some reckonings, these polls can actually end up meaning something. In the case of the political straw poll, the news coverage it generates can give candidates sufficient publicity to become more credible in events where voters cast genuine ballots that elect delegates to state or national conventions. And you can bet that someone, someday, will cite the results of the cybersex poll to ''prove'' some point. Survey researchers cringe at this sort of thing. They're right. OK, it's time for our final question. People who take online polls seriously are: a) Poorly informed. b) Brain-dead. c) Looking for love in all the wrong places. Dan Gillmor's column usually appears each Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. He'd invite you to his Web page to vote on whether he should quit and become a street musician, but doesn't want to post another bogus online poll today. Visit his Web page (http://www.mercurycenter.com/columnists/gillmor) anyway. Or write him at the Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Dr., San Jose, Calif. 95190; e-mail: dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. mercurycenter.com