For years, economists complained that Americans failed to get the true skinny on inflation because the federal consumer price index didn’t include the expensive computers that nearly one-third of households had purchased. So on Tuesday an altered CPI was reported, covering computers and cell phones, too.
As usual, we closed the barn door long after the horses had fled. Plunging tech costs showed computers down 3.1 percent, enough to help offset other costs and produce a flat CPI for January, which means there was no inflation. Tell that to MasterCard when you make next month’s Pentium payment.
Y2KRAZINESS
FIX THIS
America is discovering the Year 2000 problem in a big way, as vendors like Lotus hint darkly that some flavors of cc:mail will drop dead at the stroke of midnight Dec. 31, 1999, and lawyers circle the landscape like virtual vultures smelling upward of $1 trillion in litigation fees worldwide.
But the strongest indication that Y2K mania is playing in Peoria as well as Palo Alto is the publication of “Year 2000 Solutions for Dummies” as the latest in the series by IDG Books that started half a decade ago with “DOS for Dummies.”
MICROSOFT
LET’S SPLIT, BILL
Q. If Microsoft has 2,434,800,000 shares outstanding and Microsoft stock trades at $84.75 per share, what does Bill Gates’ company have in common with General Electric?
A. Microsoft and GE become the only two companies in the United States with a market capitalization above $200 billion. This “market cap,” in which the stock price is multiplied by outstanding shares, is the ultimate capitalist status symbol. In third place is Coca Cola, at $169 billion. Although Microsoft shares gained more than 9 percent last week, Gates still is a tad shy of GE’s $254 billion.
BTW, Bill personally owns 541,594,000 shares of MSFT, which puts his own market cap at $45.9 billion.
VIRTUAL REALITY
SEASICK IN CYBERSPACE
Dishwater-dull database giant Platinum Technologies Inc. in Oakbrook Terrace grabbed for some multimedia mojo last week by offering gearheads and ordinary PC buffs alike a shrink-wrapped software title called VRCreator.
One use of the software is to turn the screens that a computer uses to call up files and records in a boring database into a stomach-churning multimedia experience. Instead of opening files with the click of a mouse, you sweep down a hallway on a motorcycle and shoot them open with a submachine gun.
OK, guys, back to work.
