You might think that the WINTEL duopoly and its minions try to coordinate cycles of planned obsolescence.
However, my own observations lead me to conclude that the software and hardware are often out of sync. Sometimes the software is not optimized to make best use of the hardware; sometimes vice versa. I saw this with a Win 95 Pentium notebook that crashed incessantly til I finally upgraded to Win 98 (which required me also to add RAM--but then again the original configuration didn't have enough RAM in the first place and I'd already got around to seeing if more RAM might make Win 95 work on the machine--it didn't). I also ran into a slew of conflicts when everything, eventually, in software went from 16 bit to 32 bit (and the change from short to long file names, too). This more than anything really seemed to cause the numerous backward compatibility conflicts in the Windows OSes (and one of their selling points was supposed to be backward compatibility). I still think what most home and small office users need are relatively modest hardware platforms dedicated to well-designed suites of software, with optimization to run as efficiently and trouble-free as possible. They had this in Japan with really well designed , crash-proof word processors that had all the functions of an office suite of software. But development stopped with the WINTEL onslaught (with the Internet boom complicating things still further--e.g. web browser programs changing every month). MS also killed off development of Japan's TRON real-time OS (though Sun has recently resurrected a lot of the ideas that were behind TRON). And not only did MS make things difficult for Word Perfect, it also did the same for Japanese language word processor software. MS's clearly inferior MS Office grabbed market share from Justsystem's Ichitaro because MS made deals to pre-install its software on computers as waves of computer first-timers bought computers. Too bad no one in the industry could really give a shit about home users. As for depreciated software, I often find myself asking, 'Cripes, why did I pay good money for it in the first place?' Charles Jannuzi
