Computer prices have dropped tremendously. Why, the
computing power you can get in an el-cheapo today would have meant buying a
mainframe computer a couple of decades ago. Then, you’d probably have to hire
your own programmer to do what the average home computer can do today. Not only
are you getting more for your buck, but you’re having to use less bucks to do
it.
While computer prices have dropped, software hasn’t. A software
update today, to upgrade your favorite program to version 18.3 costs as much as
it did when you upgraded it to version 2.1, oh so many years ago. That’s a bit
if a win though, considering that everything else has gone up.
The software manufacturers have obviously learned a lesson
from Henry Ford and his corporate cousins. That is, they’ve learned the lesson
of the model year upgrade. By upgrading their software, they can make sure that
most everyone has to buy their product over and over again. It’s pretty sneaky,
if you ask me. I mean isn’t a word processing program a word processing
program? What is there to upgrade?
But, if you don’t upgrade, then your software won’t work on
your new computer, which of course has a new operating system. Since the old
software and the new operating system don’t speak the same language, the
software crashes and you can’t do anything. Of course, I really think that they
could talk to each other, at least in development, until the programmers added
an intentional glitch to keep them from talking to one another. That’s something
else they learned from the auto makers, it’s called planned obsolescence.
Planned obsolescence shows its ugly head in another manner
as well. Every once in a while, one of these great software houses makes a
change to their file format. Now, all the files you have carefully preserved
for the last umpteen years are no longer valid. Your new program doesn’t want
to read the old files, and of course you don’t have the old program anymore, because
it’s been replaced by the new one. Oops!
Yeah, well, they usually create a patch for that, which
allows your new version to read the old version’s files, but that doesn’t
guarantee that it’ll read them correctly. It could just as easily turn the file
upside down and backwards, flatten the layers, take out the attributes and change
the language to Kurdish.
Thanks, software houses, for making our lives so
interesting. Truly, the cost of the new computer was nothing, compared to the cost
of all your updates.
Oh, and just because you bought the update, doesn’t mean
that you’re out of the woods. The next bigger and better version is right
around the corner. In fact, it might come out at any moment; say, as soon as
you install the new one you bought.
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