The Terror of Maturity

No, not the maturity of people. Nor pets. I’m talking about an industry, one I’ve followed all of my adult life: personal computing.

Yes, personal computing is mature. This doesn’t mean that there’s no further progress to be made in advancing the technology. What it means is that for the majority of people, damn near any modern computer will meet their needs, from the standpoint of both hardware and software. This fact scares the living hell out of the major industry players.

This is not some sort of sudden industry earthquake. It’s a slow, gradual process that draws in more and more people as the state of the art improves and becomes everything they need. I have a friend who still uses Office 97, and another who still uses Office 2000. I myself stuck with Office 2000 until 2010 or so. Why? It did everything I needed. I bought Office 2007 for its ability to add comments to documents, and later looked at Office 2013, but I see nothing there that I need and don’t have. I paid a box shop to build me a Win 7 quadcore tower in 2011 that was my primary desktop machine until it started getting flaky in 2023. I bought a name-brand 8-core mini-tower running Win10, and scrapped the quadcore. As I’ve mentioned here on Contra, I recently bought a 10-core Win11 Dell machine when updates for Win 10 were scheduled to end.

It’s unclear whether Microsoft made Windows 11 incompatible with older hardware to force hardware upgrades; after all, Microsoft does not sell computers. They can force existing Windows users to upgrade the OS by dropping security fixes for the older release. And they can sell current Windows installs to the makers of ready-to-run computers, by fiat. So to some extent, Windows can force upgrades.

This is less true of application software providers. I learned page layout on Adobe InDesign 1.0, way back in the ‘90s. I bought each upgrade through Creative Suite 2, and I’m still running CS2. Newer versions will export ebook layouts, but I’ve already got Jutoh, a dedicated ebook layout package, which does everything newer InDesign versions do regarding ebooks, and more.

I’ll buy software upgrades when they provide something new or better than what I already have. What I won’t buy is software as a service (SAAS) which is basically a magazine subscription for your software. You can keep using it only as long as you keep paying for it, forever. Microsoft and Adobe have SAAS applications. No sale. There are MS Office lookalikes, and if Adobe does something stupid and remotely disables my copy of CS2, there is Affinity, now owned by Canva and currently available for…free. Affinity is offered by Canva as a front end for Canva, and can also do graphics design and photo editing, making it a peer of Adobe’s Creative Suite. Sure, Adobe offers more apps in its suite. But…do you really need all that other stuff?

Then there’s the issue of software upgrades that mostly sell other stuff. A lot of people are starting to wonder if the primary purpose of Windows 11 is to sell people on cloud-based storage and other online things, which are SAAS and (as far as I’m concerned) an immense privacy risk.

Game software (at least the puzzle games that I use) approximate SAAS by forcing you to watch an ad before each game, or at some game juncture. The Wordscapes crossword game offers ad-free play for a price, and for a set period of time. When that runs out, the ads begin again, until you fork over more cash. After playing it and enjoying it despite its ads, I paid for Nut Sort, a color-key variation on the Towers of Hanoi game, and no longer have to watch ads before each new game. However, if you want to tweak the game by adding another bolt, you must watch an ad before you get the bolt.

Both games have what I consider a fatal flaw: If for whatever reason the games’ providers can’t push down an ad…the game stops. Mercifully, it doesn’t happen often. If it happened more often I’d say the hell with them and uninstall their games. The providers are punishing game players for something the game players have absolutely no control over; that is, no one buying ads the game providers can show to players.

Summing up: In times past, people bought new computers and new software versions fairly often, because the technology was getting better at a furious pace. This is still true to an extent for smartphones and tablets, and the more people use their smartphones, the oftener they’ll buy newer and more feature-rich models. I use mine for phone calls, by and large, along with with weather radar and a small handful of other things used only occasionally. My tablets are mostly ebook readers.

I’m not spending a great deal of money on hardware and software anymore. I’m not alone, and the industry is terrified of us. I’ve not even touched on open-source software like Linux, to which a lot of people are moving in the wake of Win 11. If they weren’t afraid of it in the 1990s, they are damned well afraid of it now. Will that fear change their business models? Probably not.

Let’s watch.