This was brought home to me recently when a friend was having a gripe about her PC's less-than-satisfactory performance. I tried to engage her in a discussion of possible reasons and what diagnosis and tuning she might have to do.

"I just want it to work," she said; "I don't want to be concerned with what goes on inside it." She assumed the machine, set up by a former housemate, had antivirus protection, but she had no idea how to check whether it was there, if it was working and that it should be regularly updated -- thankfully it was.

"What frightens me," I told a seasoned CIO and tech-entrepreneur, "is that she may represent 60 percent of the PC-using population."

"More like 80 percent," he replied.

Assuming he's correct, then what should we do about this class of non-technical people in a world that is increasingly digitised? The "80-percenters"?