It sure is cold in them Nordic hills
Scandinavia is leading the way in internet use and much of northern Europe is Mecca for Net-heads. Well, that's the message according to Nicholas Negroponte, technology guru and head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab.
Negroponte used his keynote address to the European Union-sponsored IT conference in Brussels this week to attack the negative approach to the internet he claims exists in many European countries.
He may be full of admiration for the number of internet users in Nordic countries, but has he taken into consideration just how long Nordic winters are? Does he realise how much time those poor people have to spend indoors? If I had a choice between enduring another bout of SAD or hitting the Baywatch site before the windows froze over, I know which I'd choose.
For a man in charge of MIT's Media Lab not to have spotted the obvious is a bit worrying. As he said: 'I am full of admiration for the situation in Scandinavian countries. Finland has the highest use of PCs per capita in the world and Sweden has the highest teledensity.' I fail to see why teledensity inspires admiration.
But there was one topic on which Negroponte did speak sensibly - it was on the European telecoms industry's insistence on charging for local calls.
For an American, this is puzzling, I know. Where in America sheer distance dictates that a local call is defined by an area the size of Spain, common sense must now tell the telecoms industry that failure to drop the cost of local calls will starve their nascent internet provider status with any credibility and drive customers towards the competition. Necessity is the mother of invention.
The channel is set for some big realignments next year if the squaring-off between the biggest three vendors is anything to go by. This week we report, in detail, on the 18-month long reorganisation of Hewlett Packard's structure, page 42.
On the face of it a move away from the Wintel platform, it is not merely a deepening of the company's skills base. The number one player, IBM, is in constant reorganisation, but it is
sticking to a mid-range strategy which seems successful. The merger of HP's Intel and PA Risc product lines shows a surprising determination to simplify the marketing of complex products. But they still remain complex products and difficult to use.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has revealed that its year 2000 problem will cost #29 million to solve.
Chief executive George Mathewson said he found it unbelievable that the computer industry was until recently still selling systems unable to cope with the year 2000. I've got news for him - some still are, and as we will be revealing next week, they are in for a big shock when the lawyers start to turn their guns on them.