RE: Planned obsolescence

[Peter Brown pbrown@xxxxxxxx]

McSwain, Leslie, and all,

Here, here to you all. I don't usually think of myself in league with
the Luddite movement, but the great churning maw of "advanced"
technology and its effects on XyWrite has me Mad As Hell, and I Can't
Take It Anymore.

Point 1: even organizations get hobbled by this dynamic. We run a small
magazine, and we have plenty of intellectual capital (as well as the
green kind) invested in XyWrite--training, enough knowledge to do some
XPL, hundreds of little macros that make the workflow ever so much
easier. Now along comes Win95 on a network, and suddenly the hours go
by trying to make the primary tool in this office work. Printer drivers
don't function, weird things conflict, you know the story. Plus, the
geniuses who decided this was a good idea have now had to add memory,
hard drives, etc., etc., to machines (486s) that *still* aren't built to
run bloated Windows and its progeny.  So a small nonprofit org ends up
spending multi-thousand dollars so that its own prime productivity tool
(XyWrite) is (I fervently hope, temporarily) crippled.

Point 2: Having added all this whiz-bang stuff, the organization is now
tethered to various specialist repairpeople, so that when we come in on
Sunday to catch up on the magazine and something goes wrong, we can't
fix it ourselves, and we can't continue with our work. Isn't that
smart--an entire group, energized enough to put in the hours of
dedicated work, and it can't proceed? We resisted this stuff for
years--kept our 8086 class machines until 1994, and some people ran Xy
3+ off floppies. How's that for reactionary? Then came email, the Web,
the LAN, and we were back in the clutches of the MIS department and
more--I say back, because of course the trend toward centralization has
already been through the computing world once or twice before. Remember
the rallying cry of distributed data processing? When people would be
allowed to have real microprocessors on their desks, instead of dumb
terminals?

Well, now, it's the revenge of central planning.
         
      E-mail: pbrown@xxxxxxxx         



> Leslie et al: Sorry to be a bigmouth, but I watched this same process
> over my father's shoulder in amateur radio . . . .