© Merle Harton, Jr. | About | XML/RSS

Technology's New Underclass?

Several years ago, in the late 1990s, my mother bought a used computer at the local thrift store and it ran Windows 98 and a standalone email client, Juno, which she used to email us. It was nice seeing my mother enter the computer age. What wasn't nice was seeing her reaction to the many changes that this new technology carried with it: relentless "improvements." Change, it says, or you're underfoot and you'll surely get stepped on.

My mother used her computer for nothing but email. She had a slow-baud external modem that emitted the typical crash-and-burn sound as it connected. It was all very simple. She turned the system on and checked her email and then responded. She could save mail, delete it, retrieve what she wanted. Life was good. Then the email client, perhaps overshadowed by American Online (AOL), MSN, Earthlink, and the like, converted its free service to a fee-based ISP. Generally based on a targeted advertising model, it did not achieve the desired revenues as a standalone email client. Juno merged with the NetZero ISP in 2001.

My younger sister set her up on AOL and then my mother had to learn how to maneuver through the labyrinth that is the contemporary AOL package. That is why I won't use AOL: it's an attention pig. AOL thinks that its customers want a complete world of AOL everywhere on the screen, all of the time. In my mother's case, it's an enormous distraction. All she wants to do is receive email, send email, get picture attachments, save them, print them, respond. That's it.

Now I'm not singling out AOL for this. AOL is a special case. As a former customer, I believe the company doesn't have a clue as to what its customers want—so it just gives them everything. Throw enough of it at your customers and some of it is bound to hit them in the face.

After AOL, my mother had to contend with the demands of a new computer system, a new operating system, Windows XP, and now Vista. She really doesn't need all of that. What my mother needs is a much smaller environment, something uncomplicated, perhaps something customizable, like a clean Firefox browser. I thought I had found it at a friend's house. Jim is a concert promoter. He has an enormous plasma screen and every July, for the Pepsi 400 stock car race, he has a NASCAR party. He's a much older gentleman, in his late 80s, but still fairly tech-savvy. I think he invites me to his annual event because eventually he always gets around to saying: "Oh, while you're here, I want you to take a look at my computer...." I come to expect that, and of course enjoy fixing the small things he's having trouble with. I mention him because he doesn't use AOL, but prefers to use CompuServe.

You might remember CompuServe as the major online provider before AOL. It's now owned by AOL. In 1980 it was purchased by the tax company H&R Block and eventually found its way into Verizon and AOL. Wikipedia has a useful but sprawling article on CompuServe. Here's a section that depicts the CompuServe transfers, showing also how weird technology properties are:

In January AOL let its CompuServe customers know that it would not support the Microsoft Vista operating system, advising them to switch to the AOL brand or go elsewhere.

Okay, back to my friend with the CompuServe application. He's using what's known as CompuServe 2000 (v5.0 and later), which resembles the AOL interface, but less obtrusively. A CompuServe classic version (v4.02 or below) is available at OldVersion.com: this version more closely resembles the older services like Prodigy, Genie, and the original AOL. My observation is that he keeps an interest in computing because this stripped-down version of AOL doesn't overpower the user with a cornucopia of features that won't be used. He uses it for email and browsing, but that's about it.

Since we just convinced him to move to DSL, he now doesn't need CompuServe as a dial-up application, so also won't need the whole CompuServe environment. If he moves over to Vista in the future, it will have to be discarded anyway. So what application is it going to be?

That brings us right back to my mother's situation. There just doesn't seem to be a market for older computer users who want to use their PC for simple communication, but who also don't need to have literally everything in front of them. There is an opportunity here for entrepreneurs to provide services for what may well be a growing underclass of technology users.

Oil Sobriety

You might want to hold off buying that new car. Yesterday MSN Money reported that crude oil reached another record high:

Not surprisingly, per-gallon costs for heating oil was up 31.42% for the year and unleaded gasoline was up 33.62%. I get the feeling that we ought to get used to seeing these numbers go higher and higher.

If America is addicted to oil, the Cheney-Bush administration seems unlikely to bring the American infrastructure into a state of sobriety. It certainly seems unwilling to do so. We all know, or at least have a sneaking suspicion, that our ignominious adventure in Iraq has something to do with oil, and the energy legislation (HR 3221) before the House of Representatives this week will, if approved, take more baby steps toward energy conservation and away from US dependency on fossil fuels. What's the hurry?

In his doctoral dissertation, defended at Sweden's Uppsala University in March, Fredrik Robelius puts forth more evidence that the peak production of oil is nearly upon us. In Giant Oil Fields—The Highway to Oil: Giant Oil Fields and their Importance for Future Oil Production Robelius uses the largest oil fields in the world as a kind of measure of oil availability. He says:

Peak oil production is important because it marks the point (usually depicted on a bell curve) where its maximum rate of production is reached; everything after the peak is downhill, ending in the extinction of extractable petroleum in every form. No one agrees on where that peak is. We're already moving on to the heavy sludge pumped in Venezuela and the difficult-to-extract oil sands deposits in Alberta, Canada. If Iraq had no oil beneath its dusty sands, the US wouldn't give a glance in its direction; now we're bombing them all.

On July 18 the National Petroleum Council, which advises the US Secretary of Energy, issued its draft report, Facing the Hard Truths about Energy. Looking at the global energy situation over the next 25 years, it comes up with a glass half-full: "The world is not running out of energy resources, but there are accumulating risks to continuing expansion of oil and natural gas production from the conventional sources relied upon historically. These risks create significant challenges to meeting projected energy demand." If I live a full life, God willing, I expect that I will get to witness the end of oil as a fuel. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas continues the debate over peak oil production, but the Robelius model moves that date to "any time from now," as the African saying goes.