David Maynard writes:

Well, pencil and paper 'does the job' too but a text processor does it
better, and a WYSIWYG word processor does it even better, depending on how
one defines 'better'.

Yes, but those major leaps in functionality are mostly history now.
These days, the improvements usually involve multicolored transparent
menus, or larger and fancier 3-D icons, or other bells and whistles
that consume hardware and software resources but contribute nothing to
the basic purpose of the computer, for the average user.

Well, some people still have no computer at all and I'm building a tube
amplifier. Neither says much about the state of the broader market, or
people in general, as they're fringe/niche situations.

The broader market (and especially the worldwide market) is only
slightly beyond DOS today.

You're assuming there just isn't anything 'left to do' that can matter and
I'm not willing to make that assumption.

There may be plenty left to do; the problem is that nobody is doing
it. Software companies tend to content themselves with adding useless
bells and whistles--software bloat--to their products with each
upgrade, because adding truly new features and functionality requires
a lot of expensive development and involves taking serious risks. The
idea is to milk existing business for all the money one can, so
companies are unwilling to take risks with novelty. The bigger the
company, the more true this becomes.

You're losing track of the issue here, which was whether an O.S. 'upgrade'
can offer a significant enough improvement to warrant the 'upgrade', not
whether every last soul on the planet uses it. And I was pointing out that
the O.S. changes needed to take advantage of 32 bit technology, vs 16 bit
technology, was a significant enough performance increase.

Maybe. So what next? To justify an upgrade, I need something truly
interesting, and I just don't see that happening. The last upgrade I
found _interesting_ was from Windows 3.x to Windows NT (I never
bothered with Windows 95 and its ilk).

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