You're the boss so you must have lots of nice Compaq kit at home. I have quite an impressive desktop PC with a flat screen monitor, and a notebook PC, and I have a similar desktop in the office. I also have one of those hard-to-get handheld colour iPaqs, and I do use it an awful lot. I carry it around and sync to Outlook twice a day. I quickly write emails to individuals and thoughts to my assistant, and the minute I synchronise, whoosh, they're off: it's quite powerful.
In the next few months it will have a mobile sleeve added and I'll download real-time. There's a whole new community developing on the web around PocketPC devices with people downloading MP3s, books and videos and so on.
How much email do you get? Typically,I get around 300 emails a day, but about half of those are copied to me rather than written to me. I spend half my time answering email. There's a great opportunity for anyone who can do something to simplify it with voice recognition and artificial intelligence.
What are your favourite websites? I'm a big car fanatic so I like looking at sites about classic cars, and I frequently look at the What Car? website. I catch up on the latest news about Formula One - we sponsor the BMW Williams F1 team and www.williamsf1.co.uk.
It's a bit Compaq-centric, but because we have the Compaq NonStop boat in the BT Global Challenge, I like to log on and see how that is going.
I have to look at different newspapers, and I also like to tap into papers in San Diego, where I grew up, to keep in touch with the community and see what's going on. Then I have a favourite football team - not a gridiron team, I've been converted. I support Chelsea. That will probably alienate half your readers!
What brought you to Europe? I came to the UK nine years ago on a 30-day assignment, and got the opportunity to head up a big project at IBM. Then I met my wife here, and the rest is history.
Compaq UK used to be one man in a rented office, back in 1984. How big is it now? Compaq UK is around 10% of Compaq's business worldwide so it's around $4 billion. We have about 5,000 people working in sales and service in the UK, and a similar number in manufacturing up in Scotland, where we manufacture everything for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We're one of the biggest exporters in Scotland.
How important is the internet? To me, it is as profound a development as the advent of electricity in the 1900s. I think we are in the early stages of realising the full potential of the net. The convergence with wireless devices is just one step on the road to transforming the way we live our lives both at home and in the workplace
