Henry T Ford had vision, but no sense of colour at all. The car-maker promised customers any shade of vehicle they wanted, provided it was black. From where I am standing, everything's going grey.

Agonising over an ageing population is not new. Unlike with fuel costs, Aids or Balkanisation, European policy-makers can hardly claim to have been taken unawares by the issue. It has been literally decades in the making, and the numbers are stark. In 1990s Italy, the most extreme case in Europe, there were four people of working age to support each over-65-year-old. By 2008, it will be one in three. In 2035, it will be less than two.

This factor pushed Italy down to 145th out of 146 countries in a survey of growth potential to 2020 - Tigers 2020 - carried out by Lombard Street Research of the UK. Germany was 144th. Spain, Portugal and the Scandinavian countries were not that far ahead. The only EU exception was Ireland, which enjoys both a youthful workforce and a healthy flow of returning migrant workers (as well as its own inflationary problems).

Add to this the acute shortfall by 2002 - estimated at 19 per cent of all IT jobs in western Europe by Accenture, the management consultancy - and you have a severe mismatch between the needs and supply of the labour market. All of which makes even more mystifying the fact that marketeers insist on behaving as if technology were the prerogative of the young.

As the population ages, over-55s should become prime consumers, producers and targets of Europe's high-tech economy. But when was the last time you saw a mobile phone advertisement which did not feature either a high-powered young executive, usually male, or a low-powered teenager, usually female? Internet service providers, such as AOL Europe, self-consciously appeal to families with children by emphasising the use of parental controls on surfing activities. Aside from a few niche portals, older surfers are generally marginalised.

On one level, this youth marketing makes sense. Young people have more mobile phones, easier access to the internet and a well-established disposition to use both. Think, however, of how differently Napster might have fared if it had positioned itself as an ideal tool for sharing back-catalogue editions among older music-lovers rather than copying the newest releases. And the current youth bias among new consumers will not always hold true. Reduced growth forecasts from Nokia, the handset manufacturer, have triggered alarms of a saturated handset market.

By comparison, older consumers remain relatively under-exploited. If this is true in the narrowband world, it is even more so in broadband. To make a return on network investments, broadband operators will need consumers to display a willingness to pay high subscriptions - which has proved largely elusive among the young. "Always on" fast internet access promises a whole raft of new applications - from digital home video editing to security alarms and remote medical diagnosis - which are particularly suited to the well-heeled older consumer.

It should also bring new and improved content, which will make most current websites look jejune, cheap and distinctly naff. Hope I quit before I get that "young".

Email Carlos Grande at carlos.grande@ft.com