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5.14.2004  

As Soft As I Need To Get

It's occured to me that I've virtually stopped upgrading my software, both at work and home. OK, not everything - I still salivate at the thought of updated, more-standards-compliant browser releases and am in a protracted love affair with everything iTunes - but the major tools that I use regularly seem to be getting the job done without much left to ask for.

The latest and greatest Adobe marketing push barely even dents my attention shield, and it really doesn't help that they've joined this insane bandwagon of naming releases with meaningless alphabetic extensions like "CS" instead of just copping to the fact that it's freaking verison 8. (Note to product naming specialists: the Honda VX, DX, CX line pissed me off enough back in the day -- can't anything retain a meaningful title anymore? All I wanted to know was which one had air conditioning! I now find myself engaged in conversations along the lines of "Was DreamWeaver Ultradev before or after DreamWeaver MX?" - seriously. This is pitiful.)

Anyhow, I remember back to previous Photoshop upgrades, for example, and how much blather was lathered about something as useless as the Liquify tool... I have played with it for hours, but never once used it for anything. And take Microsoft Word (please! - har.): is there any earthly reason I'd want to load revision 17 with built in character sets for Brobdignagian dialects? There are so many menus and tools already that I actually get lost trying to change page margins.

Is this some historical threshold, that the primary tools needed by us analog entities for the routine stuff have gotten good enough and that's that? Or am I just bored with installs, a few new tweaks, and then the same ol crap? Or --OR!-- perhaps I'm just a backwards-looking middle-aged economy-stalling change-averse self-focused commie!