EDITORIAL - Concentrate on the here and now

What is Intel playing at? In the run-up to the Christmas retail bonanza, the usually rock-steady company is introducing more uncertainty than it has ever done in one single business period.

Any corporate worth its salt is planning for a downturn in the economy for next year. Resellers are also preparing for a hard battle in 1999. The heart of any uncertainty is the ever-changing developments in microprocessor development. So the very same corporates steadily planning to introduce the Merced IA-64 chipset should look at it a bit more closely.

This is Intel's first stab at 64-bit architecture and, quite frankly, it looks like the company is struggling with its technology. It has been delayed by almost a year according to some pundits. Resellers must be scratching their heads in bewilderment, particularly when you consider the same sorry mess at the PC end of the spectrum - anyone who has bought a Pentium II then discovered that the LX motherboard chipsets actually run their PC faster, must be horrified. The Intel roadmap is looking more like a Sunday meander through the country with no particular destination in mind. The confusion is not helped by reports that the Mendicino processor works faster at a level 1 cache than even the Pentium IIs. So which one do you recommend? Or do you look to the likes of AMD or Cyrix that have at least kept the technology upgrades at a smooth acceleration? Intel also invites confusion by branding the Celeron processors separately. And it looks as if the Foster processor will run faster than Merced. But Intel has been happy to let us know those only months before the badly delayed Merced even comes out.

So why should resellers take a chance on recommending it? It seems to me that Intel should stop looking so far into the future - it is already talking up the McKinley and claiming it will be twice as quick as the Merced. Do we really need to know that far in advance? How many companies really plan that far ahead for the implementation of an unproven technology? It would probably be better to trim the roadmap down to manageable proportions and just let us know what the next few streets are going to look like.

It may be time to bulk-buy copies of Dad's Army videos. The news that the Scottish Secretary has memoed the Defence Secretary saying the government should consider mobilising the Army to help deal with the problems which may result from the millennium bug conjures up some very stark images.

There is no suggestion that they intend to mobilise the Home Guard, but with the swinging cuts that have taken place in the ranks of the Army over the past few years, and which continue with the present government, it is difficult to come to any other conclusions. It doesn't take a millennium bug expert to ask the obvious question - why overreact at the 11th hour? What can the Army do if all the NHS machines with embedded chips, which have not been replaced, go haywire? They can go about shouting 'don't panic', but there is little of practical value they can do - by then it is too late. But it is strangely comforting to know that at last they have accepted that fact.