Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 558.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 08:31:48 +0000
From: Matthew Zimmerman <mz34@nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.546 success forgets: premature senescence of equipment
Neven,
I would say your analysis is correct. It is a combination of the natural
desire to "progress" and aggressive marketing. I think most people use
about 5% of the features of a product like MS Word, even though it has been
"updated and improved" many times. I suppose if your job is to develop
software, you naturally keep trying to make it better. With the
"improvement" of software comes the need of faster hardware, even though
most do not need the better software or the faster hardware.
It would serve most of us well to really consider if we do need to
"updgrade" and then decide if compatibility is really an issue. Microsoft
makes most of its sales on this fear of incompatibility, but often this is
an unwarranted fear. Most word processors do the trick for the documents I
need to produce, and they all save in text and RTF format, so I stick with
my trusty BBEdit. But it is really hard to convince some people that they
wont be "behind the curve" if they don't upgrade.
Matt
On Tuesday, March 11, 2003, at 01:49 AM, Humanist Discussion Group (by way
of Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 546.
> Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
> www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
> Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
>
>
>
> Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 06:42:26 +0000
> From: Neven Jovanovic <neven.jovanovic@zg.tel.hr>
> >
>Maybe it's my field talking (classical philology is notoriously
>conservative), but there is e. g. computer software--not to speak of the
>hardware--which is not yet obsolete when the new version arrives--in a way,
>becoming history before it had time to mature; I mean, software with some
>features which perfectly suit my needs, or with other I have not even had
>an opportunity to explore. And then--all too quickly--there arise questions
>of compatibility (with colleagues and students who regularly update)... A
>case of head-over-heels progress? Hubris or aggressive marketing strategies?
>Neven
MZ
_________________
Matthew Zimmerman
Humanities Computing Group, NYU
Tel: 212.998.3038
Fax: 212.995.4120
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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