scott wrote:

> There job is to make money for the company.  50 people writing Word 2010 
> will make more money than 50 people optimising Word 2003.  They can't 
> help it, it's all the customers that would prefer paying for a buggy and 
> memory hungry Word 2010 compared to a lean and mean Word 2003.
> 
> If you want to change soemthing, you need to convince the majority of 
> computer users NOT to buy the latest software for MS...  Good luck.

Well, I don't stand a chance against the M$ marketing machine. Even 
Apple doesn't - and they have money.

Sadly, M$ has managed to convince the general population that it is 
"normal" for computers to not work propperly. If you bought a washing 
machine and it didn't work properly, you'd take it back and demand a 
refund. But when people buy a computer and the software on it doesn't 
quite work properly, people just think this is "normal" and 
"acceptable". This, truely, is M$'s contribution to the field of 
computer science.

(It really makes me angry that M$ are allowed to broadcast adverts on TV 
telling everybody how "good" they are. In my mind, this should be 
illegal under the trade descriptions act. But anyway...)

>> Now I'm puzzled - when I bought 1 GB of RAM for my PC, I had to pay 
>> several hundred pounds for it... Am I living in an alternate reality 
>> or something?
> 
> You're living in the past :-)  Price of computer stuff goes down pretty 
> quickly - it's always surprising if you haven't looked for a while.  I 
> bought a 64MB memory stick for £40 a few years back - now I was 
> surprised that a 1GB one is under £10.

I *was* going to sell my old CPU on ebay. I mean, it's a moderately old 
now, but I paid about £250 for it when I got it.

However, this was before I discovered that you can buy it new (exact 
same model, clock speed, socket, everything) for £21.

£21. Retail boxed. With a warranty.

Who the hell is going to buy a second hand one?

>> And that's just it, isn't it?
>>
>> Why bother fixing the problem when you can just throw more hardware at 
>> it.
> 
> I think it's more the case of the software writers taking advantage of 
> the hardware improvements.  If MS were still only offering an 
> uber-streamlined version of some old Win NT to run on our 3 GHz 
> dual-core machines, I think Linux and MacOS would be doing pretty well :-)

There's a difference between "taking advantage of" and "wasting".

Do you even remember when WinXP first came out? And how everybody has 
utterly horrified at the minimum hardware requirements to make it 
function acceptably? It's been around so long now that everybody seems 
to have forgotten that XP takes four times as much hardware to do the 
same thing as older OSes managed to do quite happily...

(And then there's the sad fact that M$ doesn't know the difference 
between "operating system" and "entertainment system". Even in the "pro" 
version of XP, you still get lots of silly toys like games and video 
players and so forth that I have to spend ages uninstalling. Surely what 
most businesses actually want is a tiny OS to run their *real* 
applications on top of...)

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