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

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (1124)	10/23/1998 8:46:00 PM
From: Pierre-X	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2025

My goodness Yogi, what a set of dominoes you've started falling. <g> I'm glad to put any clouds behind us. I did derive some benefit from your comments which caused me to rethink my stance on PC accessibility. Well, my stance hasn't changed, but I've articulated it to myself more clearly. <g> --- Opinion: I agree that, going forward, PCs must continue to get easier to use. Wouldn't you agree however that PCs have come a long way from the "C:\" days, when working a rig was an art-arcane, suitable only for geeks, nerds and lepers. Three cheers to PARC Labs, inventors of the windows-based graphical interface. Their seminal work revolutionalized computing for many many millions of subsequent computer users. One possibility that I see in the future is a two-tiered or even three-tiered layering of PC operating systems. At the low end, for novices, casual users, and dumb terminals one can employ a "lite" operating system, perhaps some evolutionary derivative of the Windows CE and Windows 98 we have now. At the mid-end, for heavy business users would be the "standard" grade operating system. Perhaps not even a separate package, but merely an "advanced mode" that is option available which makes available the full array of OS options and configuration panels. At the high-end you have the server-grade/developer-grade OS which exposes much more of the inner workings of the system than is necessary for business users and home users, but which is required for server administration and applications development. We already have the beginnings of such tiering in the form of Windows CE, Windows 98, and Windows NT. However the motivations for these different packages were not originally ease-of-use grades, so they are not pure forms of power-tiers.