Computerworld, the trade rag of choice for discerning corporate information technology honchos everywhere, polled top industry seers about what to expect in 1998 and got this suggested headline about the Microsoft fight with federal trustbusters from Mike Tardif, IT guru for Goldman, Sachs & Co.: “Microsoft pays off the national debt as an out-of-court settlement.”
WHO’S A NERD NOW?
TAKE THIS JOB. PLEASE!
Maybe it’s because our kids hear us call people like Bill Gates “geeks” and “nerds,” but lots of young people are deciding that a computer science career isn’t cool, and hundreds of thousands of jobs are begging to be filled in today’s booming information economy.
The National Software Alliance (www.software-alliance.org) reports this week that between 190,000 and 450,000 information technology jobs are unfilled and unlikely to be filled in a world where computer science graduates are declining in numbers. Nearly 60 percent of high-tech companies say they simply cannot find enough employees.
COMPUTERS
FLATLINERS?
Frenzied post-holiday shopping continues for PCs well past Dec. 24, and it now looks like a whopping 1.5 million households will have purchased a computer over the 1997-98 holiday season that ends Jan. 31, a survey by International Data Corp. and A.C. Nielsen Corp. has found.
A bummer of a sidebar developed when it turned out that the majority of these expected buyers (52 percent) already own at least one PC. As a result, the booming sales did little more than match population growth.
Overall, computer ownership is languishing at around 40 percent of America’s 99.5 million households for the second year in a row. By contrast, 98 percent have TVs.
Thinking what he calls the “unthinkable,” computer analyst Frank Catalano frets in the current Computer Retail Week that maybe the PC “simply doesn’t appeal to the majority of U.S. households.”
GAMES
CYBERVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Okay, okay, it’s just a theory. But social climbers with a computer in the rec room probably will relish “Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life” by Discovery Channel Multimedia, a $40 MMX-optimized PC game that pits up to 6 players against each other to see who can think up the most successful species and then evolve lesser critters to join it.
You start as a cell that wants to be a jellyfish and eventually grow some fins and start hanging around in tough tidal basins until you sprout feet and legs and crawl up the beach to kick some dinosaur butt. Other players, of course, built that dinosaur and may eat you for lunch.
Not all that unlike a day at work, is it?
