Seniors online

Thu Jan 29 00:11:23 PST 1998

Web Sites, Other PC Wonders Draw Large Crowds of Retirees

By JIM CARLTON
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 1/29/98

LAGUNA HILLS, Calif. -- Welcome to Leisure World -- retirement
village and launching pad for the Web.

People who live here are wired, in every technological sense of the
word. The local personal-computer-users' group, which numbered 40 in
1994, has exploded to about 1,000 members. Computer-training classes
have no openings until spring.

A computer "gives you an incentive to keep moving around," says
Harry West, a 94-year-old Leisure World resident who uses his PC to
track investments, tour on-line museums and e-mail the
great-grandkids. "I think it's a wonderful thing, about equal to the
telephone in terms of progress."

Leisure World is no anomaly. Packard Bell NEC Inc. reports that in
1997 customers over age 55 accounted for 14% of retail purchases of
its PCs, up from 11.7% the previous year. Last year, 36% of
Americans between ages 50 and 64 owned a PC, up sharply from 27% in
1996, according to surveys by the American Association of Retired
Persons.

People aged 50 and over who have computers use their PCs 14 days a
month, for an average of 130.2 minutes on those days, according to
the PC Meter tracking system of Media Metrix Inc. Their
minutes-per-month total is 47% higher than the average for all age
groups, the New York-based market-research firm says.

That's good news for the industry -- which is scrambling to figure
out how to capitalize on it. "The big challenge of marketing to
seniors is they are so diverse," says Hollie Chriss Cronin, senior
manager of desktop products at AST Computer, the Irvine, Calif.,
unit of Korea's Samsung Group.

Officials of the big PC maker Packard Bell Electronics Inc. in
Sacramento, Calif., say they have only recently begun holding focus
groups with older people to formulate a marketing strategy for them.
Packard Bell, along with other manufacturers, has also been in
discussions with Microsoft to devise a marketing campaign for
software that might appeal to the older user.

One pioneer in this field is WebTV Networks Inc. of Palo Alto,
Calif., the Microsoft unit that developed Internet-access terminals
for television. Soon after the WebTV box was launched in 1996, the
advertising campaign included this radio spot of an elderly woman
reading aloud an e-mail to her son: "No, I didn't get a computer. I
still do not know what a gigabyte is. I got WebTV. I just push a
button on the remote and, voila, the Internet is on my TV. And son,
I plugged it in myself."

WebTV officials say they targeted older people early on as potential
users of the new device. "We assumed older people would gravitate to
being able to communicate with family members, especially," says
Colleen Bertiglia, WebTV's director of marketing. She says WebTV
plans to distribute the boxes in places such as retirement homes and
hospitals where high numbers of the elderly are concentrated.

The marketing opportunities are even greater on the Internet, where
a number of sites have sprung up that appeal directly to older users.
A site called thirdage.com, for instance, was set up in 1996 as a
clearinghouse for information of special interest to older people,
such as retirement housing and estate management. The site touts
various chat rooms and discussion forums on the order of "The Empty
Nest: Peace and Quiet or Deafening Silence?"

Thirdage.com has become so popular that it draws an estimated
250,000 visitors a month -- or a cybercity the size of Anaheim,
Calif., according to the PC Meter.

Mary Furlong, chairman, chief executive and founder of Third Age
Media Inc., the San Francisco company that runs thirdage.com,
envisions this kind of site as the electronic equivalent of a small
town. "People no longer connect on the front porch, so I created
this for an on-line sense of place and community," says Ms. Furlong,
who previously founded another on-line site for the elderly called
SeniorNet. "With the Internet, they never have to be lonely."

Or bored. In Leisure World, 76-year-old Joe Schwarz, a retired
electronics engineer who is one of the community's volunteer PC
instructors, says, "I asked the question one day to some people in
our PC training class, "How many of you are up at four in the
morning and can't go to sleep? All hands shot up. I said, 'Get on the
Internet.' "

And are they ever. Retired surgeon Sidney Sacks, 84, estimates he
spends four hours each day surfing the Web from his Leisure World
home. Dr. Sacks, originally from South Africa, retired in the U.S.
two decades ago but is still able to keep up with the news from home
by scanning on-line copies of his favorite South African newspapers,
the Cape Times and the Johannesburg Zanow.

"It all gives me a great thrill, and it keeps me occupied every
day," Dr. Sacks says excitedly. And after he's through, his wife,
Hildred, seizes the keyboard and spends her computer time creating
electronic greeting cards of varying designs and colors. Then she
goes on-line to send them to friends and family, all over the world.

Leisure Worlder Clara Rapp, a retired teacher, relies on her PC to
clear up all the accounting mistakes she used to make in her
checkbook. "I was always off by a few dollars," says the
77-year-old. "Now, I get it down to the last zero." A neighbor,
81-year-old Betty Kasel, has taken up digital painting. "I've got a
17-inch screen," Ms. Kasel says proudly, adding with a sigh: "I've
only got a Pentium 133, and it's almost too slow now."

With the aging Baby Boomers right behind today's retirees, an even
greater explosion in the number of older PC users is expected in the
years ahead. The Census Bureau projects the number of people above
age 55 increasing to 27.5% of the total U.S. population by the year
2015 from about 21% now.

Leisure World's Mr. Schwarz, walking at a brisk pace as he leads a
tour of the growing computing facilities at the community, is a bit
wistful about such projections. "My only regret," he says, "is that
I won't be here 50 years from now to see where all this technology
goes."

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