New and (not) Improved
August 22nd, 2005 | Published in Technology | 1 Comment
I’m glad someone else has noticed this. Does anyone else realize we spend thousands of dollars on computers, only for them to become obsolete in a year? And what about all that cheap furniture we buy that is made of cardboard with printed wood pasted to the outside?
Newer equals better. So say the world’s vendors of home electronics gear, and billions of us have believed them.
So we threw out our old vacuum-tube radios in the 1960s, and replaced them with transistor-based stereo sets. In the 1980s, we exchanged vinyl phonograph records for digital CD players. And today we’re replacing the traditional CDs with MP3 music recordings, buying filmless digital cameras and watching flat-panel TV sets instead of those bulky old picture tubes.
Yet most of these new gadgets don’t work any better than the gadgets they replaced. Often, they’re worse.
August 23rd, 2005 at 9:55 am (#)
The only place I see this not being the case is within the more recent Open Source Movement. I haven’t seen such community involvement within software dev to date. But then again… what do I know.