David Maynard writes:

Until the next one.

As technologies mature, breakthroughs come less and less frequently.

I remember people who said a desktop itself didn't contribute anything to
the "basic purpose of the computer" either but it's a heck of a
productivity improvement.

It depends on what is meant by desktop. Graphic user interfaces
contributed to productivity in some ways, by extending the usefulness
of the computer beyond plain text, and by making multitasking
environments easier to manage.

You're either in a different world than I or you mean something more
cryptic than I'm able to decipher.

You're probably only looking at a handful of developed economies. The
entire world is much further behind. Even in developed countries,
there are large institutional users of computers that are still
struggling with 16-bit Windows. And Windows 9x is still very common.
Where I work, everyone is still on Windows 9x.

Oh, come on. You're not seriously going to try telling me that you know
what 'everybody' is doing in software, are you?

I don't have to know. It's a general principle, applicable to
software like anything else. Why risk billions on a new software
product that may or may not succeed, when you can make almost as much
by adding a few "features" to an existing produce with virtually no
risk and very low cost and then charge for upgrades?

Depends on how one defines "truly new." Is Microsoft trying to invent the
'truly new' neural network emulator? Probably not. But that doesn't mean
there's nothing 'useful' left to do with the 'old style' desktop operating
system approach.

I suppose there are some people who look forward to things like
aggressive, and intrusive DRM, or filesystems that are designed to be
continually searched and indexed, but I do not, and I don't think the
majority of people care.

You and I have different standards then because I only need the new to be
'enough' more useful whether it's "truly interesting" or not and I wouldn't
go back to NT (assuming you mean NT4) because I find the new 'bells and
whistles' worth it.

Yes, I mean NT 4. Of course, XP looks uncannily like NT, especially
if you peek behind the superficial user interface.

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