Here’s what I want: I want a dollar for every hour I’ve spent changing my life to cope with unnecessary upgrades.
Why am I ranting? Right now, it’s because of Windows 7.
Our school implemented Windows 7 over the summer, so faculty came back to a new environment in which our favorite teaching software did not work. Thank goodness IT was slow about upgrading the lab computers, so we were able to head them off at the pass before thousands of dollars’ worth of physiology data acquisition equipment became so much useless electronic debris! Some departments, that depend on classroom computers, weren’t so lucky. Those profs are scrambling to find replacements for the activities they designed their courses around.
So I wrote to my brother. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t own a bed, but has eight computers. Surely he would know how we could run virtual Windows XP environments on the Windows 7 platform that had been forced upon us, and he did. But his advice came with an innocent question:
“What kind of software is it that requires Windows XP, and cannot run on Windows 7?”
THIS. IS. THE. PROBLEM.
Not that my brother has that question, but that the IT guys at Microsoft probably have the same question, with the same tone of innocent astonishment. If, that is, they have even thought of it.
The people designing upgrades are, by definition, on the cutting edge. They don’t have any idea how little the rest of us care about being up to date. How out of date would I be happy to be? I wrote my first classroom tutorials in Apple Basic and ran them on an Apple IIc, and I would be just fine with doing that today.
I’m writing a story right now about someone who takes a job in hell. I think one of the perks they promise her is NO UPGRADES!
