Until this year. As much as I want to maintain the innocent unquestioning optimism that characterized my past predictions, I am too shell-shocked.

In spite of assurances that the technology market has no choice but to rebound, I haven't even made any investments at the rock-bottom stock prices that most wise investors now find appealing.

For anyone who is not a regular reader, here's a little background on what 2000/2001 was like for me. In February, 1999, I went to work for a local software company that showed tremendous promise along with a tantalizing stock options package. Although our first layoff took place in October of that year, we regarded it as a small "correction" that would right itself when our customers got past their Y2K jitters and started buying or upgrading. In 2000, the expected recovery didn't happen, and the company lost three/fourths of its staff from layoffs and attrition between October 99 and June 2001. In June, I was laid off.

Since I had averaged at least one call per month from headhunters after the layoffs started, I wasn't worried about getting another job. I just notified the headhunters that I was now available. The phone never rang, not even to say "Hi." In a two-month self-conducted job search I found two job openings that fit my skills. I was offered both, and started work at the one I chose in August.

Unless you have been on another planet, you know what September was like. As a result of the destruction, my new company (which in 13 years had never seen a layoff) saw business partners go belly up and our own foundations begin to shake. Two years almost to the day after the layoffs started at my old company, layoffs were announced at my new company (a telecom company.) I'm still employed, but the sense of deja vu is uncanny. And as the company's newest employee, my position is probably one of the most untenable.

Now that I've got my gripes out of the way, I'll tell you, not so much what we will see, but what I'd like to see. I'll even offer some ideas to would-be entrepreneurs.

A Decent Pay Music Website
Thus far, all the recording industry has offered us to replace Napster is an expensive, deliberately hobbled delivery system that offers inferior quality products for exorbitant prices. From what I understand, they are now selling music files that blow up after a certain period of time and play badly because of all the copy protection schemes attached to them. Most can't be burned into CDs.

Has none of these idiots ever taken Sales 101? If they did, they all failed. The formula for creating desire to buy in the consumer involves pricing factor PLUS quality factor PLUS hassle factor. The recording industry's scheme fails on all three points.

Offering decent music at a decent price and making a bundle isn't hard to do right. It should be tremendously profitable if you think of all the music out there that can be sold. The big profits wouldn't be made so much in the recent music world but in the oldies, where development costs are not a factor and where competition from marketed CDs is negligible. It would be especially appealing to baby boomer geezers like me that can't find some of their favorite music from the sixties in ANY format. I'm still looking for Francis Lai's version of I'll Remember April. Even an e-mail exchange with Francis Lai himself didn't turn it up.

What the recording industry must do first is give the public credit for wanting to do the right thing. Consumers won't object to paying for a download, if the file is of decent quality, promises to last, and allows one to burn CDs. Perhaps some people will pirate recordings, but that is just the price of doing business. Pirated songs often become so popular that actual sales increase significantly. Consider it advertising.

Set up a credit card system that allows members to deposit $20 or more in a music account. Provide the user with a login and password. Every time the user downloads a song, debit the account by fifty cents (maybe a dollar or even two for a much-awaited just-out song.)  Notify the account holder when the account gets low. Let the frequent users set up a recurring charge to the credit card if they want. Keep track of the artists or copyright holders that are selling in order to calculate and pay royalties. Gather every bit of public domain music that exists.

After the computer website is available, develop an interactive system for my Direct Satellite TV System. Develop a simple CD-burner device that connects to the DSS box. When I listen to the music channels on DSS, have a button I can push when I hear a song that I like. The mechanism is already in place to select and buy movies via DSS so a song would use the same selection and billing mechanism. The songs would be saved to a storage device that perhaps holds enough songs for one CD. Of course, I should be able to select between .wav and .mp3 format. When storage gets full, it should prompt me to insert a CD and it burns the song files into my CD.

I can either keep the CD as is or transfer the files to my PC to burn my custom CDs. Maybe I can even connect a PC to my DSS system and use the hard drive for CDs.

Convenient Hearing Aids
Probably a minute minority of my readers are hearing aid wearers, but all of you are getting older. As you do, more and more of you will either join our ranks or spend the rest of your life saying "What?" Thus, you do have an investment in this technology advance.

Hearing aid wearers should not have to take off a hearing aid to listen to a portable CD player or talk on a cell phone. Hearing aids should come with a port that allows the wearer to plug a patch cord from a portable music device or cell phone directly into the aid.

My audiologist tells me that the Hearing Aid companies won't spend the money for these luxuries, so they offer us expensive, useless devices such as remote controls that get lost and cost a bundle to replace. The aid is in my ear, not on the other side of the room. Of what possible use is a remote control?

Microsoft's Stripped Down Operating System
I cant believe it took the US Justice Department to tell Microsoft to strip down its Windows operating system, and it wasn't even for the right reasons. Microsoft should strip down its operating systems, not to be fair to other vendors, but to stay in the game!

What is the most popular new operating system available? Palm! You don't get more stripped down than Palm. It fits on a tiny device with a tiny memory that is maintained by two triple-A batteries.

When Microsoft went down the Windows road, PC users had basically two choices in operating systems: DOS or Mac. The biggest shortcoming of DOS was NOT that it lacked graphics. Its biggest shortcoming was that it was primarily command-line driven. The user had to type arcane commands (and worse, remember how to spell them) and sometimes a complicated series of command line parameters that defied even the best typist. What DOS needed most was menus, not graphics.

Another DOS shortcoming was its lack of support for multitasking. This meant that you had to completely close and back out of one application before you could run another. At present, I'm consciously running four applications at once in what I'd call a conservative PC session. I would imagine that six to eight applications would comprise an average session. This is what Multitasking is made for.

DOS got both menus and multitasking when it offered DOSShell in its 5.0 and later incarnations. However, Windows 95 blew DOS away as an independent operating system and gleefully caged its remains into the DOS window.

What we got in its place was an operating system that required a monster PC to carry it. It sold a lot of post-486 chip-based PCs. It helped the PC industry, but selling PCs became something like selling cages for elephants. When people wanted something small they could carry in one hand, an elephant operating system wasn't appropriate. Enter the Palm OS.

My Palm allows me to carry around two years' worth of data, cool programs and games and I still haven't used up twenty percent of its capacity.

Windows CE doesn't begin to compare with this system. It's still way too overblown, the underlying assumption that users want all the fancy "features" and capabilities that their desktops offer. Once you store some data on a device running CE, the system runs like an underwater ballet. The last place you need a poky operating system is a device you use on the go.

What users really need is an operating system that is quick and responsive, menus that are intuitive and uncluttered, and reasonably easy input and output of information. What the Palm people did is offer mostly text-based capabilities (almost all our work is based on text) and a menu system that is based on the assumption that a Palm (or Visor) user can read.

Until Microsoft can do the same, its' eventual extinction is guaranteed.