>Doug, there is a difference between upgrade and planned obsolescennce -
>especially from a Marxist point of view. Upgrade is an increase in the
>use-value, whereas planned obsolescence is an increase in the exchange
>value (thus the profit marging) of a product.
Oh come on now. Yeah, the computer industry is full of greedy bastards, and lots of innovation is just crap, but it's not as bad as you're saying. Mac OS 8.6 was an improvement over 8.5.1, which was an improvement over 8.5, and so on. The Sherlock web searcher, introduced with 8.5, which submits queries simultaneously to all the major indexes and sorts the results very intelligently, is a damn fine piece of software. You can wax sentimental about the XT, but its 10 meg hard disk couldn't even accommodate my fonts folder (75 megs, 1,184 files). Microsoft stuff is always bloated and klunky, but the latest Excel is lots lots better than the 1.x I started with in 1986. Eudora Pro 4.2 is a lot better than Eudora Lite 3.x. It's not all a fraud, fer Chrissakes.
Doug