Mxsmanic wrote:

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.

And that was the point, along with the summary of the general principle you
snipped out, that "'Bells and whistles" are often more useful than the
cynic realizes."

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.

Which has, for all practical purposes, nothing to do with the matter of
whether companies do 'new things', or just add 'fluff', as people who do
not use the things are not in the market.

Even in developed countries,
there are large institutional users of computers that are still
struggling with 16-bit Windows.

And I can find folks in "large institutions' that don't use computers at
all. You're overstating another fragment.

And Windows 9x is still very common.
Where I work, everyone is still on Windows 9x.

Yes, and I suspected that by "DOS" you meant to include anything even
remotely connected to it. Not exactly cricket as the GUI *was* the (second
half) of the 'big idea' that made Microsoft what it is (and began the gist
of this thread section)


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?

Sounds logical except it isn't a "general principle" and companies
introduce new products all the time. Some succeed, like Apple's IPOD, and
some don't. And it's pretty much the same with startups except you don't
pay no mind to failed startups and they don't have anything else to sustain
them when they do. Not to mention that most startups are the 'new company'
equivalent to your 'modify existing product' approach, making something
akin to what exists with some new 'bells and whistles' added: their 'better
version' of it.

Plus, it's becoming increasingly clear that you don't consider anything
that even remotely resembles the existing product to be anything more than
a 'bell and whistle' upgrade while I have stated that a sufficient
performance improvement is my criteria. E.g. If the topic were cars it
seems that nothing short of magnetic levitation would satisfy your need for
"truly interesting" while I would consider a hybrid significant enough.
Hell, I might even consider "rides like a car but has the payload capacity
of a truck" sufficient enough because it fills a useful functional criteria
regardless of not being "truly interesting."

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.

If that were the entire feature list I might agree with you, but it isn't.
Nor is the 'end user' the entire market.

Compared to NT4, a fully functional PnP alone is reason enough.

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.

Now, 'peaking behind the superficial user interface' really *is* something
the majority of people don't care about.