Old farts and loose laptops

The latest survey shows IT companies aren’t keen on hiring mature workers.

Well, who can blame them? Have you ever tried to get to the printer when there’s a stack of Zimmer frames in the way? It’s not a pretty sight.

And that’s another problem – the old geezers’ eyesight ain’t what it used to be either, so they keep changing the settings on the monitors in the show room to 640x480. The only people happy with that are the spotty gamers and we can do without a shop full of them and their empty wallets.

Of course mature workers do have their place. Nobody can sell tech to grandma the way they can. And these days, grandma is the only one who can afford to buy tech toys, despite the falling prices. She’s the only one not spending all her money on petrol for the SUV.

Aren’t you wishing you bought the turbo diesel version now?
Speaking of prices, I’m sure you’ve seen Pioneer’s new laptop which you can sell for $799.

Yeah, that’s the price for a pretty basic model but adding a DVD, decent memory and a WiFi card you can still sell the thing for less than a grand. Alright so Windows is extra, but the penguin is free, and just yesterday I saw claims that you can run Mac OS X on any laptop without much effort.

If that’s true, Apple is going to have a problem – the company has no experience of being a market leader. Bill Gates is probably prepared to take the loss of market share in return for watching someone else cop the monopolist jibes – it’s not like he needs the money.