Fairfax Tech Talk Column

I was looking through some photos recently and stumbled across an old photo of me from 1995. It was a newspaper clipping that had me with my head down on my keyboard sound asleep. No, it wasn’t a photo at the end of a night of hard-core gaming. It was at the opening of my business at midnight for the launch of Windows 95. This week sees the twenty fifth anniversary of the official launch of Microsoft Windows 95. Steve Jobs had not been at Apple for ten years so this was a heady tim ..

Pick your extravagance of choice. Chocolate, coffee, fruit, whatever. If I offered you a free single serving of your indulgence immediately OR a full day with free access to your preference if you went without for a week, would you wait for the greater reward? This is the basic premise of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Young children sat down with one marshmallow in front of them. If they could resist eating the single marshmallow for fifteen minutes, they would receive two. In fol ..

I started selling computers in 1989. Desktop computers. It took me three years to sell my first notebook. Despite the fact that desktops only hold a market share position of 22.6 per cent now, thirty years ago it was rare to see someone use a notebook. There were two main reasons – high price and poor performance. The first notebook I did sell had a monochrome screen and was using the brand new 486SX processor along with 2MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive. And I wanted one – b ..

I attended a local Chamber of Commerce function in April 2004 and the guest speaker was Tom Potter. No, not some distant relative of Harry. Tom founded the Eagle Boys Pizza chain in 1987. During his presentation, Tom mentioned that they had expanded the chain through New Zealand and had a monopoly on certain aspects of the pizza business in that country. As a throwaway line, Tom noted that many people think competition is good in business but he was of the opinion that owning a monopoly busi ..