Green Daily

The IBM PC and virtually all of its clones have been "modular" and upgradeable for nearly 30 years. Unfortunately unless we see a wholesale change in attitude from software vendors and users (starting at the top of the foodchain, with Microsoft) we'll continue to see personal computers w/ a "useful life" of about 3 years.

Why? How?

Think of it as an intricate dance of many steps, performed by a couple going by the name of Mediocrity and Greed, played to a tune composed by the partners Ignorance and Apathy. Here's how it goes...

Software continues to lose efficiency at a pace roughly equal to efficiency gains of hardware.

This is why recent tests showed that an early model Apple performed most tasks equally as fast as a late model when running the same applications from the dominant vendor (Word, Excel). Same productivity, even though the early unit sported a 68000 processor running very slowly, using very little memory, while the later unit is clocked over 50 times faster and requires vastly more memory to do the same work.

Why does this matter? Because given semiconductor process advances (smaller feature size means less power consumed per feature), if vendors were still selling machines based on a 68000 processor and associated modest hardware the core machine could run on something like 2 watts, an order of magnitude less than what we have today.

Software continues to expand in size even while shrinking in quality because vendors will be severely punished by shareholders if they fail to sell to us again this year what we already bought from them last year. Faced with constantly re-inventing the same product over and over again, smart coders leave established software vendors to go and do something more interesting, leaving behind the kind of coders happy to create ever-larger and more poorly crafted iterations of the same thing, ad nauseam.

Marry the continued degradation of software build quality with the desperation of hardware vendors to reward-their- shareholders with ever more "value" in the form of goods sold regardless of utility or elegance and we're almost all the way to a tragedy of the commons.

Which is where users come in, in all our apathetic sloth and ignorance. For our part we're confronted with "OS rot", the tendency of installed operating systems (especially that of the dominant player) to irreversibly degrade due to accretion of malware, vendor add-ons etc. We see the machines that are sold to us in a state of marginal adequacy quickly become unusable.

Do we educate ourselves enough to fix this problem by simply refreshing the machine with a fresh operating system copy? No, actually. Industry figures show that about 96% of us are too spineless (useless, really)l to be even slighted interested in helping ourselves. Instead, we obediently head to Best Buy or wherever for another heaping helping of Dog Food from Microsoft or Apple.

Why are we using laptop computers with lithium ion batteries so energy-dense and thus unstable that exploding laptops have become the butt of jokes as well as the concern of transportation officials and fire marshals? Because we're so stupid we continue to buy crap software even though we know exactly what we're in for because we've done it before and have absolutely no reason to think it's going to be different next time.

So next time our machines reach their "end of useful life" let's think about it a little harder...

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