Re: Reasons not to upgrade to Windows 12
To some extent it's the stock market's fault. They can't be satisfied with a nice little earner, they demand growth.
This is basically it. And it's the one thing that everyone seems to be right about - the current assumptions underlying our economic model are no longer true. We just diverge on whether we go down the tech-bro corporatocracy and sell the world to the billionaires in some sort of anarcho-libertarian act of onanism, or go the other way and recognise that a profitable business is a profitable business. You don't need to go out of your way to pad your figures to please the speculators at the stock market if you're making money and happily paying your staff and taxes.
In the consumer tech space, most products are way past "good enough", and consequently many industries are on a replacement cycle, not a growth cycle (Reg passim: "The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now). My mum is still rocking her Macbook from 2012 (with RAM/SSD updates). It's fine for normal browsing/productivity.
My Dad adheres to the business module from his 1970s engineering course where "you must have growth". And back then it was somewhat true - in a rapidly growing marketplace, a failure to grow meant falling behind. But "growth" then meant improving tooling, improving your assembly lines. Achieving more output per worker hour. Investing (what a word!) in robotic welders and CNC toolstations. But in a static market where population growth has tailed off and the speed of welding robots is limited by the rate of heat flux (i.e. you're up against physics of metallurgy) rather than better controllers or more precise stepper motors. What businesses call "growth" now, economists call "scaling" - opening a second line with additional robots.
And in the software world... "growth" means growth in profits, not economic output.
Take Adobe. Adobe got to the point where basically everyone who wanted Creative Suite had it. People were skipping versions, going from CS3/4 to CS6 or whatnot. As their ideas for new features tailed, their MBAs scratched their heads and moved the whole thing to a subscription model, marketed as a lower barrier to entry and you "got the latest features". Which frankly were pretty limited until the last couple of years when inferencing/AI tools like content-aware fill and selections have been legitimate improvements.
Adobe have seen great growth in profits but not in product development or productivity. Indeed, many of their products have become less stable - to the point of alienating their own ambassadors.
The same could be said of Microsoft. My Dad couldn't believe that he couldn't just buy a copy of Office any more. Why sell you a copy of Office for £150 to install on your laptop and use for 5 years when they can extract £500 in subscriptions over the same period? Of course there's a cost in building the online version and providing you with some storage that you don't want... but not that much.
The fact is, Microsoft Office did basically everything you needed it to do in about 2008. Most "improvements" since then have been fudging about with UI for no particular benefit. Some people prefer it, but it doesn't actually work any better than it did (I'm sure there are some specialist functions in Excel that a handful of users value, but for the 99th percentile we're using it for the same thing we did in 2010 on a dual-core i3 with 4GB of RAM. I say "we". I use Libreoffice).
The world is paying more for less, and people are now waking up to the fact that this smokescreen of GDP growth doesn't equate to improvements in employment or business productivity (and that GDP is an increasingly meaningless measure of a nation's economic output). Whereas in China, GDP growth does equate to them actually making more stuff and developing manufacturing/tooling/development expertise.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
