Ask Slashdot: Dealing With a Fear of Technological Change?

An anonymous reader writes "Despite the fact that I am fairly young at twenty-four years old, people see me as rather 'old school.' I regularly use Lynx, IRC, Pine, have many consoles open, and am currently typing this on an older plain black laptop that has a matte 4:3 display and no chiclet keys. As the days progress, I am coming to the realization that the 'old school' computing world that I grew up in is slowly fading away and a new world of Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking is starting to become fairly common. If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation. Like many Slashdot users (I am sure you know who you are), I do not accept the new as easily as I probably should. How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers? If not, what are some effective strategies to utilize to keep these kids off my lawn?"

Comments

Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[neye_eve]

Having gone through some of the same things, the best advice I can say is to ignore those feelings publicly. At work I'm riding the wave with the rest of them. At home I'm back on my happy train. The last thing I want is to be marginalized at work because I'm "that guy" who is a roadblock instead of a guy that moves things forward.

In the tech industry, you do NOT want to be the enemy of the executives.

Definitely point out real problems when they're there, and nix projects that are bad, but try not to let your bias lead you to make irrationally bad arguments. And who knows, you might learn to like some of the stuff, which will help you in the future as well both because you know more, and also because your attitude will be more open. It's worked for me so far at least - I just bought an iPad and a Surface Pro today for testing, will be getting a Nexus to validate very soon as well. It's actually pretty fun.

In any case, good luck, and long live lynx!

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[TWX]

I've found that very little is actually new. There have been tablet computers for some time. There have been wearable computers. There has been "social media" since the days of Fidonet. We had "SMS" fifteen years ago with bidirectional alphanumeric pagers and TAP.

Very little is new, it's just reinvented again and again and again. And again, and again. Accept this and just do what you need to do. Eventually you'll come to understand it and won't be stuck with some weird, antiquated version of Firefox running on your Debian 2.4 box because you refuse to change. It doesn't friggin' matter.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Darinbob]

The problem with the OP is the attitude that there's something wrong. There isn't. It isn't "fear" of new stuff, but the logical realization that new stuff is not necessarily better, and in many cases is worse. In other words, do not be worried that you're not embracing all the stuff that the masses embrace.

Most humans don't embrace the new and throw out the old, it only appears that way because marketing has control of what you see and hear. Very often there is a fad that dies out because the masses realize that the new wasn't actually worth switching to. New ideas that do take hold are often old ideas that are scaled up or made more practical.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Ghaoth]

I'm 64 years old (shock horror!) I began with vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, etc. I learned UNIX on an IBM1130 and went through many incarnations of many OS's. I now use Linux and reluctantly Scumsoft Windows (in a VM) have Android phones and tablets. Don't stop learning and evolving. If you can't beat them with code, beat them with experience but never give up.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Kozz]

It feels SO awkward to observe geeks flirting with each other like this.

24 yo?

[Cornwallis]

I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?

Re:24 yo?

[Mitchell314]

Get a bigger 'get off my lawn' sign?

Re:24 yo?

[oodaloop]

Let me just say, and I think I speak for everyone on Slashdot, change your damn socks already!

Re:24 yo?

[ModernGeek]

Don't listen to him. Stick to your ways and keep contributing to F/OSS. If the "old school" tools are used and maintained, then they are still alive. Keep coding, and keep using your computer.

One day when all those iDevices are obsolete, and can't be upgraded or used because of their proprietary lock in mechanisms, you'll be laughing from your throne as you did not allow yourself or your utilities to become useless.

The best advise I can give to you is to not give into proprietary hardware just because it is shiny and new. You'll find yourself replacing everything every two years, and pouring money into the coughers of corporations. You'll become more dependent on the grace of other companies, and at the mercy of others.

Don't try to be hip, and don't run with the crowd just because it's there.

Re:24 yo?

[verifine]

I just spent 3 days at a HP-sponsored event. Can you say Windows? I happened to mention I use Emacs as my editor. Everything was fine up until then, using Linux is "geeky/cool," but for a couple of listeners, using Emacs equated with being ancient. Bizarre. I don't GAF (think about that) what people use to create files. The created file and what it does in the grand scheme of things has always seemed to me to be the more important aspect of it all, and if you like vi, yay for you. I've used Emacs since before many IT people today were born.

People are mostly awed when they enter my office, get behind the "wall o-monitors" and see just how many xterm windows I'm running. More disturbing for them, since several are running tails, they move. My visitors are intimidated, though that is never my intent. I imagine them thinking, "How does he manage so much information at one time!!!"

When command line is history, I hope to be history

Re:24 yo?

[girlintraining]

I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?

Considering how fast new things come (and go) in this field, anyone with more than five years of industry experience can claim to be "old". Anyway... Can I just say -- you need to update your wardrobe if you have 24 year old socks. My car isn't even that old, and it's falling apart; If I kept socks for that long, they'd be like... sock molecules, held together only by determination and a fierce desire to not be trendy.

Re:24 yo?

[tnk1]

I agree that if something is not broken, you don't need to fix it. Using terminals and lynx and other stuff is completely valid, although using a text browser is starting to have more and more limited applications once you start seeing more and more functionality where Javascript manipulates a bunch of icons to get functionality. I'd almost say that for anything you can still use lynx for reliably, you should probably just use curl or wget for.

On the other hand, whether he likes to use older stuff or not, it is in his best interests to at least understand how some of the new-fangled stuff operates. Someday, people will stop supporting what he is using, and he'll need to know what the alternatives are and be able to use them.

I remember being just fine with Microsoft Word 5.1a on my toaster Mac, and liking it much better than a lot of what Word turned into with later versions. Presumably, if I still had my toaster Mac and a printer, I could still use it today. The problem is that, eventually, the toaster Mac breaks, or they finally add a feature that 5.1a doesn't have, which you absolutely MUST have, and it's all over. You better hope that when that day comes around, you figure out how the dreaded "ribbon" works.

Also, while a lot of this stuff is a fad, sometimes, the new stuff you can't think of a use for actually has a use that you just hadn't thought of. I wouldn't have bought my tablet unless there were things I could do with it usefully, and I've found even more useful things to do with it now that I have it.

Don't get the new toys just to have new toys, but don't scorn new things just because they are new either. That's one way to find yourself in trouble and your skills suddenly obsolete.

Re:24 yo?

[Cryacin]

I'd vote for getting a new pair of socks.

Re:24 yo?

[lennier]

Using terminals and lynx and other stuff is completely valid

And don't forget that in the Microsoft enterprise-backend administration world (which appears to be following a tech trajectory diametrically opposed to the shiny-flashy-broken all-Surface-no-substance Windows 8 world), there is a very strong trend back toward the console, via Powershell.

Things go round and round and round again, but even on Windows, the command line endures and conquers.

By the way, Powershell does some things much, much better than any current command shell on Linux. When are we going to get a bash-alike that is based on piping arbitrary objects? (And Powershell objects are pretty neat, they're not just raw .NET objects - they're dynamically reconfigureable-at-runtime things much more in the old Smalltalk spirit than anything that came after C++). Ruby would probably do it, if someone could add piping support to it and hack up the libraries to make it interface with all the various incompatble object OS and object systems under the Linux/X hood.

Re:24 yo?

[PCM2]

I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?

I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending -- and you wanna know why? Think about it. When the original iPhone came out, he was 18 years old. For his entire adult life, there have been iPhones, and the iPhone was the first real major technology shift he'd ever seen. For those of us who have been through all sorts of booms and busts and cycles and trends in the computing industry, things look a lot different -- as they will for him, when he really gets old.

His whole submission reminds me of those things that pop up on Buzzfeed every now and again -- "Twenty things that will make you feel old" -- and half of them are photos of the all-grown-up-now former child actor from some kids' show on Nickelodeon that you've never heard of because the first episode aired in 1994.

Re:24 yo?

[grcumb]

I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending

In some important ways, it is. The process isn't complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.

The days of 'Homesteading the Noosphere' (as ESR put it), are coming to a close. Scale, network topologies, business models and legal encroachment on the principles of individual online freedom are all conspiring to make the technological world we live in substantially more constrained than it's been since the internet became part of our lives.

The land rush is over, the cowboys are gone (either buried or rich) and the homesteaders are being bought out by the speculators and tycoons. Community-based governance is under siege by national and international interests.

And this is being reflected in the tech world. The craftsman's approach to software (always greater in repute than in reality) is decidedly more difficult to practice as a trade than it was. Toolkits are giving way to frameworks and apps replace applications. Backyard-mechanic roadsters and dirt-track races are swallowed up by Nascar - VCs get us excited by the prospect of building only big enough to sell out to someone bigger.

The physical networks themselves are being taken back by the telcos and proffered to governments for surveillance in exchange for ever more egregious rent-seeking behaviour. What we used to call sharing is now piracy. The word 'copyright' now means 'don't copy at all, ever.'

And in the midst of it all, we're grateful to lockin-vendors who make Free software difficult, if not impossible, to use. We rent what we used to own. Even our identities are no longer our own.

I grieve to say it, but unless there's a sudden and immense resurgence of the DIY spirit, especially in peer networking and distributed data, we're going to fall back into the bad old days of the dumb terminal and the smart network. And that network's smarts will not exist for our benefit.

I'm pushing 50 now, and do I fear change? Not really. I just regret the lost freedom, the creative anarchy of the '90s, the ability to hack something cool and new, the chance to achieve things never before possible. It's not gone yet. We could still turn things around. But every day we don't brings us a day closer to the day when we can't any longer.

Do you need to?

[Galaga88]

If the current tools you have are getting the job done, I don't see a need to change.

If you want to force yourself into getting started with new technology, I'd start with a rootable Android smartphone, or a Nexus 7 if you don't want to spring for a phone plan. Then just jump right in to exploring it.

You'll learn a lot of the new interface tricks that are shared with tablets/phones, there's a lot of devices and web services they can integrate with, and you can still get your hack on and put SSH and all that other fun stuff on the device.

Umm, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.

Umm, no. That is the exact opposite of what most humans have a desire to do. We hang on to things that we know. Why do you think Windows 8.1 will have a "Start" button? By and large, people hate change.

You aren't refusing to change

[msobkow]

You're actively regressing when you stick with a text mode browser in the modern world. You aren't "old school" -- you're stubborn. Old school would be sticking with what you learned to start with, not specifically choosing something from the late '70s or early '80s to work with.

Your big problem is you need to grow up.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[msobkow]

Let me rephrase that:

Using the command line tools does not make you "L33t". It does not make you "cool".

Using archaic tools for modern jobs is just flat out asinine. You didn't grow up with those tools -- those tools are from my university days. And I'm 49, not 24.

Stop fooling yourself that you're special and use the right tool for the job instead of being stubborn.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[plover]

And what, in your expert opinion, is the right tool for the job? Back in the day I never bothered moving to pine, because I figured elm was good enough for me. (And it was.) Now I seem to spend half my workday in Outlook, and it makes me exactly every bit as productive as elm did. It's worse, actually, because these days everyone has email and it's now far too easy for the unwashed masses to cc: a status report to a hundred people who simply don't care.

If a newer tool doesn't provide a demonstrable or measurable improvement, what makes that new tool "right"? What makes the old tool "wrong"?

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a bit unfair... some of the older tools are actually better for the job. The Linux CLI is usually faster than a GUI filemanager (because of globbing and tab-completion). Pine may not be pretty, but again, it's faster than Thunderbird. And 16:12 is definitely better than 16:8 for a laptop, even if the movie-tail is wagging the productivity-dog. Use the best tool there is, for you.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Aguazul2]

Who says the console isn't the right tool for the job? Even Windows has PowerShell, and Windows 2012 can be installed without any GUI at all, relying on remote shell access for maintenance. If you do this all day long, the shell is often the best tool for the job. Point and click and GUIs are for getting things done when you have little previous experience with that task (or for things that obviously require graphics).

You learned what???

[Anonymous Coward]

"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."

When did Slashdot start accepting submissions from Bizarro Earth? Or in Bizzaro Speak, When did orgDotSlash start rejecting admissions from Normal Earth?

Uh, no.

[seebs]

"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."

I guess you haven't learned anything, then.

Maybe try again?

Switch Careers

[RajivSLK]

If you don't have a desire to change and accept the inevitable progression of technology switch careers. I hear the amish are making wonderful fireplaces.

Why adopt the new if the old works just fine?

[Wee]

I use pine (well, alpine) daily. I'm typing this with an IBM Model M keyboard made in 1988, hooked up to an old, re-purposed Dell with parts from all sorts of sources. I don't keep a lot of xterms open, but I do love xfce's tabbed Terminal Emulator app. I still use things like job control and screen, even though I could have 100 ssh sessions going if I wanted to. When I need to make some quick-and-dirty HTML, I probably use tables more often than not. I still look at usenet. I write (gasp!) perl scripts from time to time.

So why use all those "old" things? Because they work. Why not switch to something new, or stop using screen when I can hit shift+ctrl+t and get a new session? Because there's no compelling reason not to use screen. It still works. Sure, you don't see things like rlogin, rsh and (maybe) ftp anymore, because those things no longer work sufficiently well. Why don't I bother with things like a "semantic desktop" that can sync all manner of social media and such right there in my WM? There's no compelling reason to do so. I just don't have a need for any of that. Why not carry a tablet around? Because a laptop is far mroe flexible for my needs. It still works for me, and that's my primary concern.

But the bottom line is this: If it's ugly and it works, it's not ugly. Keep your eyes out for new stuff, but just keep using what both appeals to and works for you.

-B

Girls

[egcagrac0]

How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers?

The girls I talk to want the new features. If I want to keep talking to the girls, I stay reasonably current on features.

If you want to, you can replace "girls" with "users", "customers", etc. Really, though, this is nothing new, since about Windows 95 and AOL.

you tell them i'm twice your age

[Anonymous Coward]

you tell them! i am on a pdp-11 terminal and i have to run my data stream trough a translation code that puts everything into lower case so that slashdot's filter doesn't tel me that im yelling or somethng- so iguess i'm whispering now? i have 12k of ram and a hole kilobyte of disk space. my factorite game is star trek in basic. I don't have any spiel chk ither. my power bill is about $1,000/ mo for the computer and ac. sometimes - aside from marketing hybole - technology imporovments are a good thing, sonny.

Your experience is contrary to mine

[melchoir55]

" If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation"

The above quote is in stark contrast to my own experience in life. I'm not much older than you (29) and I have found that people often require extremely powerful motivators in order to accept "the new" otherwise known as "change". There are different personalities of course, but the personality "I want to learn it once and be an expert forever" is pretty common in my own workplace. A lot of people don't push themselves to learn. I don't mean outside the workplace, either. I just mean learning the proprietary in-house tech we have. Folks learn it as much as they absolutely need to then kind of check out when it comes to the more in depth stuff. Not all people of course, but not an insignificant part of the population either.

Other examples abound. How many 60 year olds were texting a decade ago? It certainly isn't that they are too stupid, because a lot of them do it now. Old people are just as smart (smarter?) as young people with the unfortunate disadvantage of poor reaction time. It's that they had methods of approaching the world which were well worn and change is scary.

The tech crowd is not plagued with the "change is scary" mantra to the same degree as other crowds. I've found that it accepts change faster than most other demographics I've been a part of.

Your old school is new school to embedded

[Garion911]

If you're into programming, think about moving into the embedded. I work for an embedded company, and I recently got the company to realize that remote gdb works pretty well.

When your connection is only over ssh, telnet, or *gasp* serial, your old school will be very handy.

Keep adapting...

[HockeyPuck]

Me. I'm "old school", I manage, architect, support storage subsystems...

Parallel SCSI ... done that...
ESCON then FICON... yep.
NFS/SMB... yep
SSA (IBM's Serial Storage Architecture) yep.
Tape... LTO is "new" compared to the stuff I've done.
FibreChannel.. now FC over Ethernet... yep...
Object Storage... yep
Hadoop/MapR... here today...

I still manage and architect storage environments for customers...

I just adapted to what was coming... the requirements for my clients or employers didn't change. They wanted high performance, easy to manage, cheaper than the previous solution and most of all reliable..

Just keep adapting, keep educating yourself on what is here today and what various vendors are working on... All this server virtualization that people are deploying now... nothing new... I did LPARs on mainframes in the 90s. Dumb terminals... The "cloud" today is nothing more than a 1000 cheap x86 servers with software running over them to enable you to dynamically configure VMs on the fly. I did that with OS/360 years ago on a Parallel Sysplex on the mainframe. Concepts are the same, implementation is different. Requirements haven't changed that much.

Don't be afraid to evolve. Keeps you young, interesting and relevant. Plus you can apply all that you've learned to what's coming...

OP is a hipster

[Anonymous Coward]

He uses a laptop brand you've probably never heard of.

The whole "article" smells of trolling.

You are soooo new school!

[multiben]

I am so much cooler than you. I am currently typing this email by manually creating punch cards which are hooked to a morse code machine which then relays the electrical signals into a decoder I built from weet-bix and leeches and straight into the copper cables which connect my phone.

Re:Old School B-)

[jhoegl]

As utterly useless as this saying is, because it is so general I would say at least keep your wits. Because a moron reacts to changes moronically.
Such as buying a gadget without anyone fully understanding its usage or potential (tablet), or perhaps buying something because others have it (rasberry pi).
The Tablet is a niche market that exploded, because the niche is pretty large (all sales people and children under 12). it will settle down, and will not take away the desktop or laptop. It wont take away servers or networking, and it wont do anything to programming.
Evaluate items based on what they are and what they bring. Fearing technology? no... fearing things that lock you down or keep you walled in some sort of garden preventing you from reaching your potential or the devices potential... yes, very much yes.

Re:Old School B-)

[hendrikboom]

Tablets won't take away servers or networking -- tablets need the servers and the network.

I'm 33 years old

[twistofsin]

And everything you claim to have learned on was outdated when I was a fucking teenager. I have a really hard time believing that this "old school" computing world is what you grew up with.

You just sound like a computer "hipster" to me. Come crack open a PBR with me and relax .. you don't have to try this hard to be different. As someone who has done production in many industries, please let me reassure you that we wouldn't have adopted today's tools if they weren't better than yesterdays.

Your mashup of what would also be considered old (social networking) and new (Win 8) .. oh fuck I just convinced myself this was a troll submission, fuck off.

Re:Old School B-)

[Jane Q. Public]

"Because a moron reacts to changes moronically."

This.

In recent years I have seen so much change for the sake of change, it sometimes disgusts me.

Let's get something straight, folks: Change is only good if it's an improvement. Otherwise, change is BAD, even if it's just as good as the old thing. There are a number of reasons for this.

First among those reasons is that change has definite costs involved. Whenever you change something, people have to learn new ways, use something differently, etc., etc. If anybody can find some kind of major change that doesn't have a cost associated with it, I'd be delighted to hear about it.

Second, things are usually the way they are for good reasons. There are generations of people who came before who tried different things and arrived at their ways via hard-won trial and error. Changing something "just because" probably means you don't know your history and, as they say, will likely be doomed to repeat it.

When I think a change is GOOD, on its own merit, I am happy to jump on the bandwagon. But I don't drool over things just because they are new or in fashion.

You're being a technological bigot.

[Above]

It's obvious from your post that you suffer from a sort of bigotry that the technologies you have chosen are somehow better than other technologies because they are "old school", for your own definition of "old school". It will not serve your professional or social life well.

Things like IRC, console windows, and a plain black laptop can all be used to do quite cutting edge things. They are not old school the way most people would define the term. Browsing using lynx in a console when you have a perfectly good GUI and graphical web browser? That's just being a technological hipster, trying to show off to people that you're different. What you're doing isn't new either, back in the early 1990's I remember people complaining that X terminals were killing vt100 terminals, that the new squishing DEC keyboards were worse than IBM's mechanical ones, and that those new fangled web browsers were a total waste of resources, after all gopher and archie worked just fine.

What you'll find is that people trust the opinion of those who have actually used different systems far more than those who have simply developed a prejudice against anything that isn't their supposedly superior choice. The systems engineers I respect the most can sit down and just get work done on a Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, or Linux box. The great ones can also work on a VMS box, or a System/360 box, and tell you what was cool about OS/2 and BeOS. They can work in a GUI, or at the command line. They can do basic editing in both vi and emacs. They understand the right tool for the job depends on the job and is not an absolute. Most importantly they will tell you the areas in which their favorite technology needs improvement , usually by pointing out areas in which tools they don't prefer surpass the ones they do prefer. They are open minded enough to understand other peoples situations, understand their use cases, and test the tools in ways that make their recommendations meaningful.

The most important though is what others have pointed out. The technology industry is all about face paced change. I remember when pine did not exist. Seriously, if you wanted to be old school you need to ditch that new junk and use elm, or mh, or mailx. You're destined to be eternally grumpy if your reaction to every new technology is "the old thing works just fine", and you should get out of the industry right now. It's fine to chose to work on technologies you love, but it's not fine to think other technologies and the people who use them are beneath you. It's bigotry. It's nearly the same as looking down on people because of their race or religion. It's arbitrary, capricious, rude, and uninformed.

Old Phart Opinion...

[DigitalSorceress]

In my (old phart) opinion, change for the sake of change is what sucks.

For instance, I really hate the MS ribbon, it actually gets in my way... There was nothing wrong with classic menus. They're efficient - especially for "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it"... the Ribbon makes me have to hunt for everything. That was change for the sake of change. It was MS trying to make Office seem like it was somehow new and exciting... because, let's face it, their flagship product has been feature complete since Office 97 - sure, there have been a few improvements here and there, but Office XP wasn't that big of an improvement worth shelling out big bucks for the upgrade from 97... and 2003 - well, in retrospect, it was MS Office's finest hour, but it was an incremental improvement...... 2007 added the ribbon to some stuff, and 2010 completely replaced the menus. Yeah, it works just as good and has a few nice features, but I fight with the UI so much that my general perception is that it stinks. I use it cuz I have to (at work).

Be careful not to get labeled as a stick in the mud. Work with the stuff that you get stuck with, but always keep an eye out for actual good change - accept those good changes wholeheartedly, and laugh as others spin their wheels on the thing of the moment... but only to yourself - when nobody's looking. :p

when my age you are, look as good you will not

[tverbeek]

If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.

Then you have not learned anything, padawan. It may be commonly true of your peers, but it is not true of most humans in middle age or later, especially those of less tech-friendly varieties.

Re:Old School B-)

[KGIII]

We're just returning to dumb terminals and renting compute time. The terminals aren't so dumb and we pay with ads or personal information usually but, really, for everything that has changed we've really stayed the same.

Technological hipster

[ZeroPly]

There is nothing wrong with choosing an older tool because it does the better job. But claiming to have an emotional attachment to it is attention mongering. This guy is just a technological hipster - he's using Lynx to be different. He probably can' t bear to be separated from his straight razor or manual typewriter either.

It is insane to think that a 24 year old somehow grew up with Lynx and just doesn't want to change, unless this narrative involves a village in Somalia or something. We're supposed to be in awe of how special he is, but as someone who actually used Lynx when it was the only game in town, all I have to say is "get a fucking life".

Re:Old School B-)

[Taco Cowboy]

Change is only good if it's an improvement. Otherwise, change is BAD, even if it's just as good as the old thing.

What is missing on the above is the willingness to try out the new stuffs

Giving the new stuffs a try out does not mean throwing out the old things altogether - but we need to have the willingness to try out the new stuffs, get a taste of it, and only after that, we can make up our own mind whether or not we need to change

If we do not even try out the new stuffs, how are we to know if the new stuff is better, or worse ?

Re:Old School B-)

[Taco Cowboy]

I enjoy change -- sometimes even for its own sake.

You and I have come a long way, buddy

I do not change, for change sake

But I do enjoy trying out new things, and only then, I get to decide whether or not there is a need for me to change

For example, when Facebook first came out, I gave it a try, and decided that it wasn't for me

No matter how much stuffs FB has added since then, I won't force myself to change, just for the sake of changing

Re:Old School B-)

[plover]

Office365 was created for exactly one reason. It was created to convert customers from a pay-once model to a pay-as-you-go subscription model.

Who do you think Office2013's biggest competitor is? Open Office? Hardly. They're competing against the installed base of Office2010 users. They are competing against themselves. Long ago they ran out of truly useful features to add - how many users were clamoring for the ribbon bar, or Clippy? Once they improved their software engineering skills and drove out most of the bugs and security flaws, they removed all compelling reasons to upgrade. And that is cutting into their revenue stream. Subscription based software rental will keep the money taps open, but only if they can connive people into "upgrading" to it.

This change improves one thing only: Microsoft's cash flow. It was not changed out of a desire to improve upon a working product.

And you're helping sell it.