Technological Obsolescence

Its been a while since I posted something. Last 10 days were hectic and didn’t find time to put down my thoughts. Yesterday I flew from Hong Kong to Los Angeles – long flight and the new movie options were not exciting at all. So I decided to watch Mission Impossible. What caught my attention was Tom Cruise using Usenet & primitive version of email. It looked so dated that I almost wondered whether I ever used those tools.

Technological Obsolescence is taking place at the speed of light. Last 10 years have seen Mobile Handsets changing a lot – emails getting associated with gmail – people using phrases like ‘just skype me’ for messaging or calls. It will be interesting to see how quickly iPhone, Facebook, Joost, Skype, Gmail become obsolete – any guesses?

2 comments
  1. you are absolutely right about the technological obsolescence – although extending it further we will realize that we generally do not anticipate the obsolescence when investing in technology.

    If one has to compare the obsolescence in hardware and software – generally its a tendency that hardware gets replaced faster and is upgraded because either its not compatible with the software anymore or its too slow to produce a certain amount of work in a given time frame.

    Where as software – sometimes the vendors play the trick and force their customers to upgrade even if they do not want to because they will not support the version any further.

    As per my understanding one solution can be worked out to over come such kind of costs and issues which are incurred by customers and end users is to think about SaaS (software as a service model) – where the service provider or enabler has to think about the upgrades and keeping their technological backbone in line with the latest advancements. This will not affect the enduser as he gets to use the latest piece of technology at his disposal. And if the provider isn’t ready to upgrade the client has always an option to opt out and go to some other SaaS provider.

    cheers
    Parag

  2. Agreed Parag – SaaS is the future. The trick is to figure out a business & pricing model that is not based on ‘One Time Charge’ approach.

    Thanx for the comments.

Comments are closed.