Upgrade cycle will never end. It is just slowly transitioning into same thing that happens with clothes, which is called fashion. People throw clothes away because new clothes become "fashionable" and because they want to show they can expend effort to follow current trends.
For the same reason a lot of people will not be upgrading. Because they have utilitarian look at old clothes or old computers and if the new computers do not offer anything else than to just differentiate from the old, they just don't see any value in it.
Really? Then what is with all the RGB kit?
That is, the minority of currently owned computing devices.
The way people got our software was by buying a box containing a CD-ROM or floppies and a manual at their local Egghead, CompUSA, Best Buy, or similar or ordering it from a mail order place like MacMall, CDW, or similar.
There was no good mechanism to widely distribute updates, so if we wanted to get more money from a customer after that initial sale we had to do it by making the next version of the product compelling enough that they would go the store and buy another box.
Furthermore, our cut on a sale after the store and the distributor had taken their cuts was pretty small. If someone called our toll free support number with a problem that wasn't trivial for support to handle, it would wipe out all that we had made from the sale to that customer and more.
Without internet, malware only got onto a system via physical media. It wasn't like today where almost everything we do involves the internet and a potential attack. If you were happy with your OS and the programs you had, there was no reason you could not continue with them for many years.
To make money in that environment, what management wanted out of us developers was software the did what it box said it would do, reliably and without the need for the user to work around bugs and glitches, with good enough documentation that the user would never call support, and that would leave the user happy enough that when they need software for something else and see a box with that kind of software with our name on it, they would buy it.
If we did a new version of an existing product, management wanted all of that and they wanted the new version to have enough new features so that people with the prior version would be willing to pay full price for the new version.
There was no "ship it...we can fix that with an update later" attitude. It was more "we've got one shot at this...so let's do the best we possibly can".
This is also something the article points out though...
> The problem is that the tech companies have only one big tool to entice you to upgrade each year: piling on new features. More, more features. Microsoft Word was once a word processor. Today it's a database, and a Web-layout program, and a floor wax.
> Eventually these companies have no choice but to add features that nobody asked for. Meanwhile bloated, overwhelming technology has a very real emotional effect on us; we feel like idiots when we can't master it.
Though overall i agree with you that i prefer the way you mention. If nothing else i felt more in control on what goes into my PC.
Trouble is, too many people want to.
I think it’s Conway’s Law after a fashion. The organization hasn’t set me up to be able to integrate closely with the existing code, so I write new code. Or I put other people in that position because the company ties my worth to old code too tightly so I feel threatened by changes.
Reading articles about products that crash day one tells me all I need to know. I don't consider the product even after it's been patched.
It seems like there is an evolutionary cycle going on: Software becomes too complex, is being abandoned in favour of simpler products to support specific needs. They do in turn also become bloated and complex over time.
My latest think on this is something that has been discussed here earlier in various ways. I think to is because of forced growth. However, I think a lot of projects would benefit from a fixed scope and then doing maintenance really well.
A sharply-focused tool tackles a specific problem that exists at a certain time, in a certain domain. Once the tool solves the problem well, there is no reason to change it. Once the original problem is gone, the tool has no reason to exist.
Maintenance costs money. People don't want to pay a lot of money up front. They also don't want to pay for upgrades or subscriptions if they don't feel like they're getting something useful from time to time. Unfortunately, most people who buy consumer-grade proprietary software don't seem to feel that "being stable and well-maintained" is a useful feature on its own even without any new features. (Enterprise software is a different beast, of course. A very large part of RHEL's value proposition is that it doesn't get any new features, only security fixes, for a decade.)
I stopped reading at that point. I was hoping for some thoughtful analysis, not Andy Rooney.
I dont know what outher mainstream software lets you write an essay and math homework.
If I bought a new Mac today I wouldn’t buy an M1. Too much old Unix software hasn’t been ported yet. I’d find one of the leftover Intels that are still available.
My Macs run the older MacOS release. Corps run RHEL for a reason. The list goes on and on. No, you don’t have to upgrade anything.
"New features" isn't the ONLY reason to keep making incremental improvements to software. We also need to make adjustments as hardware paradigms shift over time. Hardware improvements are meaningful, and we often SHOULD upgrade software to take advantage of that.
My question is, will hardware ever stop improving? Will we reach a point where an M1-like full-desktop SOC includes enough processing, storage and graphics power that it satisfies any user's desktop/laptop needs? If/when that happens, can software stop evolving in parallel?
And a related thought, when we finally start getting significant amounts of people off the planet (space travel), will all networking software need to undergo a major paradigm shift to manage the extremely-high-latency-low-bitrate situation as a normal case?
I doubt it. It used to be that things requiring a cluster of computers 20 years ago now runs on desktops while clusters and HPC systems run even bigger calculations.
With more power, memory, and storage, things will trickle down and new approaches will take their place.
In my research, it would be great if I could use an algorithm scaling at N^5 which gives high accuracy, but it’s too expensive for most N, so pretty much everyone uses an N^3 scaling approach which is less accurate.
It is not that the Cycle never end. For example no one look forward to upgrade their Microsoft Office or Word anymore. And even without support they will continue to use it. The Author may argue your OS cant last forever to support old Apps. But that is true with everything else. Your TV, Fridge, Clothes etc Nothing we made last forever.
At the same time, Adobe is making some great improvement with each Photoshop with AI and Machine Learning. Shortening the time to do some repetitive task. And while they may not be wroth the money for everyone, professional tends to love it. And there are still some ways to go.
And just happened Microsoft Fox Pro to be on HN Front Page. I know thousands of small companies are still relying on Visual FoxPro. When the 9.0 release was 17 years ago and its patch SP2 was 14 years.
[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/12/21/google-bu...
That maybe Google would make a good spreadsheet. Or Libre Office would be a contender. But nope.
Libre Office is terrible. Buggy. And just plain janky. And it has no good PowerPoint contender.
I tried to use its word processor, but that was a terrible mess. It made me want to reach out my wallet and drop another $150 to Microsoft for another license. Even though I already bought 3 licenses, for computers that I barely use anymore, but whose license is for that computer.
I gave up and settled for Google’s online office products. It was janky, but it sorta worked. And it works across different operating systems.
But if I have to do any real work, then I’ll have to use Microsoft Office apps again.
