I'm a regular guy in every respect. I'm of average height, average weight, average tastes, average age. I worry about my cholesterol, I like sports a little too much, and I have a wife and the standard 2.1 children. I like white milk, white bread and white shirts. And when it comes to all things tech, I like the newest and greatest, but end up using the tried and true.

This is precisely the kind of background lacking in people who populate the tech industry. Most of them, I'm convinced, live in La-La Land, where everyone has cable modems and all computers are ugraded every 15 seconds.

Sometimes I wonder about their judgment.

For instance, when the dot-com bust came, they were actually surprised. But any ordinary schmoe like me could have told them that a "new" economy based on selling bulk pet food over the Internet wasn't going to last. Who wants to buy dog chow online? No one, not more than once anyway.

And so, despite the best efforts of that darned cute sock puppet, Pets.com went belly up faster than an overfed goldfish. And with it went the Internet economy.

Think of all the billions that could have been saved had all Internet business models been run past an ordinary, common-sense guy like me.

"Hey, Andy, how about an online service where you order food and it's delivered to your door?"

Me: Dumb idea. Who wants to go to the hassle of logging on, building pages, etc., to order Kung Pao chicken when you can pick up a telephone and do it quicker and easier?

See? Right there I could have saved whoever lost millions on that online food-fetcher (what the heck was its name -- Food-Fetcher.com, Green-grocer. net?) ­ that gave up the ghost last year after several meager and expensive years in business.

I'm sure you tech industry people agree, so step right up, here's your chance to consult Mr. Ordinary the Extraordinary and have all your tech questions answered, all your business flops foreseen. OK, smart guy, PC sales are slow, slower, slowest. What's up with that?

Simple. Because consumers have finally grown up. Five years ago, people bought new computers every time there was a generational jump in their capabilities, meaning every six months or so. They also bought them because easy-to-use (read that non-DOS) home computers were relatively new. These days, however, computers that were built two years ago are just fine for most of the things people use computers for. I used to trade up computers every six months. Now I've been using the same old Compaq for 18 months. And I have no plans to get rid of it. It works just fine. And if it suddenly doesn't seem like enough machine any more, I'm far more likely to upgrade a component rather than the whole shebang.

If you employ the most-people-are-like-me philosophy, that translates to slower PC sales. That won't change. It's the way it is now. Deal with it.

How about handheld computers? Palm™ just announced that it actually lost money the last quarter of last year and the reason is sales of handheld computers are boggy. Do handheld computers have a future?

Not much of one. You ever use a handheld computer? (And by handheld computer, I don't mean a Palm Pilot. Those things are actually useful.) They're awkward because of their smallness. And no matter what their manufacturers say, they're of limited use. Entering data with a thumb pad is a slow, clumsy process. And fold-out keyboards are a pain to carry. So once the kick of having a full-blown computer in the palm of your hand wears off, I think most users will end up going back to laptops.

How about PDAs?

You watch, PDA sales will slow, too. Why? Same reason as PCs. The old ones do what pocket organizers are supposed to do. (A pad of paper and a pen do, too, come to think of it.) So more and more consumers are thinking, "Why should I bother trading up?" The problem with PDAs is the same as it is for much of the tech industry --­ their initial explosion came because of their novelty. Once the novelty wore off, people stopped impulse buying and stayed with what they had instead of jumping at every new tweak and widget.

How about Web-enabled phones? Think those'll be big?

Nope. Once people get beyond the initial cool factor ("Hey, Bill, look what MY phone can do?"), they'll start to realize that maybe they don't need to pay an extra $20 a month to be able to find out the score of last night's game while they sit in a traffic jam. Instead they can use another high-tech device called a "radio." I think more and more people will reject the notion, pushed incessantly by tech industry, that we all need to be connected all the time.

OK, one last question. Will people ever pay for content online?

Music, yes. Computer programs, yes. The written word, no. Not to any meaningful degree anyway. The Internet is clearly a cheap and efficient way for the music industry to distribute its wares. And now that the industry has brow-beaten Napster into oblivion, consumers seem to have accepted the idea that paying a small fee to download music is the way of the future. Within five years, most retail music stores won't exist or if they do they'll be much smaller. The same delivery system will be used with computer programming. Retail stores won't exist. Eventually, we'll all get our Turbo Taxes, Everquests and Microsoft operating systems via download.

As for the written word, well, the history of pay-per-read sites hasn't been good so why should the future be any better?

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