Why hasn’t Vista sold well?
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But the rate of such changes that are relevant to average people has plummeted in the last decade. Graphical interfaces, multitasking, SimCity, porn, email, shopping, and dating sold a lot more new computers than nearly anything we’ve come up with since 2000 except malware. (I honestly believe that malware carried computer sales for most of the last decade. That only worked because we’ve taught people, with a combination of misinformation and omission, two great lies: that computers slow down over time, and that the only way to fix a malware infestation is to buy a new computer.)
Hardware, software, and the internet have all reached mature plateaus of dramatically slowed innovation. In 1998, when everyone was happily using long filenames and browsing the internet and playing their first MP3s and editing their first scanned photos to email to their relatives, a five-year-old computer couldn’t easily do any of these things.
But what common tasks in 2009 can’t be accomplished by a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Windows XP SP2 and a cable internet connection — the average technology of 2004? Not much that regular people actually do.
We’re still burning their trust, time, and money, but we’re offering much less in return. It shouldn’t surprise any of us that they stopped caring.
Bingo. All too often, friends and family will come to me asking for my opinions on new computers, complaining that their perfectly good machine is way too slow, and that it’s time for a new machine. One reformat/restoration of data later—and a removal of factory cruft, if applicable—and the computer in question is just as good as, if not better than, new.
That said, I wonder what modern machines and software are capable of that a five-year-old machine and software combination cannot do, that average people would take advantage of if it were made easy. I don’t really know what they would do, if anything at all.
