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

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (54398)	4/2/1999 3:13:00 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

re Consumer PC sector, some quick thoughts. One subsector I've thought a little about is PC video editing hardware. If a person figured out which company will roll out the best $300 device in time for next Christmas (for editing home movies, generating mpeg's and avi files). I tried to get that thought going on another thread, but seemed to be no interest. Message 8570842 I would assume devices would be firewire or pci adapter cards...but maybe the high end could end up as stand alone machines running BeOS? Just a thought. In general I've lost interest in anything related to PC's or consumer electronics, seems to be a glut in that sector as everything has become commoditized. All one needs to see is how the price of video accellerators is constantly falling to realize the cutthroat nature of the PC industry. It was not long ago that 3Dfx lead, well now nVidia is the price/performance leader, and you know next year it'll be somebody else. Not here to defend TNT versus Voodoo versus Rage etc, but it's a good example. Too much product, the average consumer cant sop it all up. If the upgrade cycle were every two or three years I'd play, but annual upgrades are crazy. Anyway, everybody has a nice PII by now, I should think home video editing will be a good way to sop up some of that computer power, most folks don't play games and you don't need the latest Intel chip to surf the net. Video editing is the perfect add-on to that home PC.

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (54398)	4/3/1999 9:55:00 AM
From: gnuman	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 132070

MB, Internet Growth/Demographics and PC's Many people view the low penetration of World Wide internet access as an indicator of tremendous growth opportunity for PC's. I think this fails to take into account the barriers of language, infrastructure and opportunity. If one looks at the demographics of global internet statistics by language, a number of conclusions can be reached. (I've used the data provided by this site). euromktg.com The internet is dominated by the English language. English speaking users represent less than 6% of W/W population, yet 32% of this population have access to the net. When viewed in terms of households, (or family units), a case could be made we are approaching saturation in English speaking users. While fewer than 2% of non-English W/W population is on-line, the barriers of language and affordibility appear to be major impediments to rapid growth. The GDP per capita of English speakers is $27,236. For non-English it's only $4516. To me this indicates a major barrier to opportunity. A good case in point is China. While over 15% of W/W population is Chinese, the national average income is only $785.00. Clearly the PC is not a choice for the majority. While hundreds of millions of Chinese own TV's, only a few million have PC's. In recognition of this a number of companies, (most notably Microsoft news.com ), are in the process of developing set-top internet devices, (ala WebTV), for this market. These devices are expected to sell for <$200.00. (One could also speculate this might be a major force in driving PC's further into the low priced commodity arena). The vast majority of web sites are of no value to non-English users. By creating an infrastructure of Chinese dedicated content on set-top devices, I would expect this to be the future of the Chinese internet. Intel talks of 1 billion connected PC's in the future. Look at it this way, that's the equivalent of 1/6th of every man, woman and child on earth having a "connected PC". (Or about 2/3 of world wide households/family units being "connected"). What do you think? ;-)