HIGH TECH CORNER: PC INDUSTRY SHOULD PREPARE FOR A MAJOR SHAKE UP

With Microsoft in the Department of Justice's gun sights and INTEL being lined up as well, the PC industry may be getting ready for a major shake up that will only cost you the consumer more money.

The Microsoft side of the lawsuit has to do with the fact that every 18 to 24 months the Operating System is upgraded. This is how you keep revenues growing, and it drives stock prices up as well. The typical way to cause people to upgrade is to add new features with added stability.

Feature enhancement is the easiest change that can be made in software. It usually comes from applications where Microsoft's revenues account for more than 50 percent. As an example, DOS did not come with a Calculator, Paint Application, Disk Defragmenter, Disk Compression, Tape & Disk Backup to name a few. If you use any of these, would you mind paying $80 to $120 each for these tools? If the DOJ lawsuit is taken to the full extreme to break up Microsoft into Microsoft OS and Microsoft APP's you just may have to.

The Internet Explorer issue is just the tip of the iceberg. If the Windows 98 saga makes you worry about having to buy all these tools, then you better sit down if you are a business that uses Windows NT as a server. The DOJ is looking at it next.

NT utilities start at $200 each and can easily have zeros added to the price for each tool. So the real bottom line is that Microsoft's idea of growth for their operating systems is to continue to add more bang for the buck.

How will Microsoft make up for lost revenue if the DOJ lawsuit happens? It will probably increase general software costs and increase maintenance/support fees. Personally I want more for less so I really do not like the DOJ lawsuit.

As far as Netscape is concerned, if you want to download it and use it instead of IE 4.0 no problem. Simply download it and click on that Icon instead of IE 4.0. Windows 98 brings choices and is even more flexible and robust than Windows 95. I worry about using Netscape as a browser because, as a company, they just posted a $54 million loss. How much R&D can you afford with this kind of loss?

With the Year 2000 Bug (Y2K) bug looming ever closer, I would like to expand on the current level of panic that is upon us. The stock and securities markets of Wall Street's Bull Market have a similar but potentially even more disastrous problem at hand called the DJ10K problem.

When the DOW hits 10,000 expect the financial world to come to a halt. As with the Y2K bug of only using the last 2 digits of the year to represent the date, the typical DOW applications only interpret 4 digits.

Who thought when computers were introduced to the market that the DOW would ever reach 10,000? When President Clinton took office the DOW was under 4,000.

When the DOW does hit and go over that all miraculous number 10,000 expect their software applications to interpret it as 1,000 or even 0000. Automated trading applications are programmed to shut down if the DOW falls below a preset amount. If you think you have seen big stock swings then just wait until the DOW hits 10,000 based upon the current software status.

For people looking for cheap hardware I ran across a St Louis company called EQUUS at www.equuscs.com or phone 888-870-6888. They are turning out over 7,000 Custom PCs a month at the cheapest prices I have ever found on the Internet. A power house 400 MHZ system fully loaded with 4.3 Gig hard Drive, 32 Meg of Ram plus all the high-end amenities for only $1,475. Now that is really cheap for all that power.

As always feel free to contact me with questions or information.

Rich Comeau is an electronics scientist and owner of Digital Labs of Cape Girardeau. E-mail him at digital@ldd.net