Before you think of being a do-gooder...

[Evan Leibovitch]

Tim Writer wrote:

>The public's constant demand for new and exciting over tried and true is as much responsible for this as the industry. And by "public", I mean individuals and businesses.
>  
>

The public demands new and exciting in every field, not just IT.

Beyond the relatively small segment of bleeding-edge early adopters, the 
public (using your definition) generally wants stuff that works, and in 
my experience fears change more than craves it. There are still plenty 
of shops still using Win98 and NT because they believe that the warts 
they have are less than the warts they will encounter by upgrading.

OpenOffice is an example of something that's not new and exciting. It's 
popular now because it solves certain problems and costs less, even 
though it arguably has fewer features than its proprietary counterparts. 
That is an example of what the public is demanding.

Contrast this to the tech fashion inflicted by vendors, such as the 
current geekism-du-jour, virtualization. This is a creation of vendors 
to address a problem that doesn't exist for most people -- yet 
Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat seem to agree that we need it. Most 
businesses can't keep *one*  OS under control, now vendors are telling 
them they need to run multiple environments PLUS the supervisor system 
that runs it all.

Most tech users aren't pushing for virtualization, or 
software-as-a-service, or locked cellphones, or upgrade subscription 
plans. These are all things that benefit vendors, who then try to market 
it all as end-user features and hope that either trust or dependence 
will close the sale.

- Evan

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