President's Message

About a year ago, I announced in this column that I would not be a candidate for president after my current term expired. Each April, the board selects its officers for the coming year, so this is my last message to you as president.

I have served DACS as its top officer for four years, but for about a decade I have had the pleasure and honor to have played a major role in its direction, both as a member of the board and as editor of dacs.doc. I will continue in these roles for the near future; indeed, the decreased workload will give me more time to focus on improving the newsletter and perhaps contributing more to its content.

A maxim that I firmly uphold is that one should never be allowed to become indispensable. Although I would not want to ascribe that quality to myself, the longer one serves in the same position the more difficult it is to conceive of anyone else being there. That’s especially relevant in a volunteer organization where one is often given continuing tenure by default. The rationale seems to be that if things ain’t broke, why fix ’em?

But when a breakdown occurs, it may be too late for a fix. An organization needs to be dynamic to survive; it must change and grow with the times. A necessary condition for that dynamism is new leadership and new ideas. Without those ideas and the will to carry them out, the organization will lose direction, become gradually irrelevant, and die.

The desktop revolution, which spawned the user group and in two decades has put a PC in nearly 61 percent of American households appears to be coming to an watershed. That is the conclusion of a recent consumer survey by Odyssey, a market research firm, as reported in the New York Times. Odyssey maintains that only eight percent of households which have not yet purchased a PC have any intention of doing so, while nine percent of current users expect to upgrade in the near future. As a popular pastime, the TV remains supreme, occupying 99 percent of American households. It appears that Moore’s Law, which decrees that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months, has run headlong into the 24-hour day.

That’s bad news for PC makers and the application developers whose bread and butter comes from ever faster motherboards and endless upgrades; it’s also bad news for user groups which thrived on helping members navigate the quirks and complexities that came with the not always intuitive interface. Is it the end of the line for the personal computer? Is the couch potato the highest form of human evolution? Of course not! Home computing will continue to evolve and processors will get smaller, faster and even more pervasive. The TV itself is evolving as an interactive tool and a premium form of entertainment (see the preview of the next General Meeting). But to survive and remain relevant, user groups, too, will have to evolve with the new technology.

Jim Scheef has offered to put his name up for nomination. Although new to the Board, Jim has been an active member of DACS from the very beginning, helped design our Web site, and has organized and run several of our special interest groups. He has a phenomenal grasp of computer technology, an efficient managerial style, and a clear vision of the direction we need to take. I cannot imagine a better candidate to launch DACS into the future, but if one comes along, they’ll get a chance to run as well at the April 8th board meeting.

To assist in the transition to a new administration, Jim has composed a personal intro and policy testament, which appears on page 9. I will sincerely welcome Jim as president, and look forward to a continuation of DACS’ continued leadership in the user group community.