Scenes that you don't see often:

Yes, that surely is a beautiful home you bought there. Only five years old, you say? Well, you know that this home uses Rev 7.2 Plumbing Fixtures, but the city now uses Rev 7.3. You're going to have to arrange for your own sewage. Let me give you the name of a good septic tank dealer...

Yeah, those back tires really need to go. Balding. Side on the one of them is shot. But you're using Version 4 wheels, and we only carry Version 6 wheels. We're going to have to upgrade your wheels, and your tires (since you don't want to drive on two different version wheels!), and that probably means an upgrade to your axels, trans, and drive train, too!

Why don't we see scenes like this often? Part of the answer is standards -- an issue that people like Don Norman have emphasized for years. But there's a mediating part, too: People who maintain and support standards. These are the people who keep your sewage system working, maintain the standards, and make sure that your home continues to have toilets that flush. These aren't glamorous jobs, but the jobs exist for an economic necessity. If no one made sure that tire standards existed, there would be no tire market.

But what about if no one cares about the market continuing to exist? Let's take software for schools as a good point. Who makes sure that schools can still run useful software on the millions of Apple II computers out there? Less drastic than comparing to a twenty year old design: Because these roles don't exist in the software market, I have to throw out my Quadra 840av, which was a great machine four years ago, because increasingly less software exists for it. I guess it's not true that the software fades away from the hard disk, but the intricate chain of connections between software does become increasingly weak. I recently had to upgrade the system software on that machine because of a hardware failure (because the original system software disks had somehow faded away, and you can't get old system software disks), and that caused all kinds of incompatibilities with the software that I had used daily on that machine.

The software market exists for the latest and greatest hardware. It is forever chasing the Zorch curve, using ever-more-RAM and requiring ever-faster-processors (a Sisyphine task if ever there was one!). The software market, therefore, exists for those users who are also chasing the latest and greatest hardware. There is a perception that there is no software market for those who like the machine they have or that cannot upgrade at the pace of Moore's Law. It's not a glamorous job to make sure that five year old processors are still useful. But until someone supports software as if it were at least as important as sewage, the technological revolution will only exacerbate differences between those who can afford a new processor every 18 months and those who cannot.