There is a distracting commercial by HP on TV in which an employee walks through an office while everything around and on him changes: his clothes styles, the office buildings out the window, his office layout and all to a stuttering beat – and the voice over – “HP helps keep up with incessant change”.
Well I have an HP printer and I cant find drivers for it. And I have a Compaq server that is barely three years old and it cant run the latest app development software because it has 512MB of memory and has only 800MHz CPU (“whopping overkill” I was told when I bought it). The last four packages that I have reviewed – Rational Web Developer, Macromedia Flex, Oracle 10g, and Sun Java Studio Creator – either would not install or just balked at performing on such a machine. Not good.
I should know better, Moores law is still operational. But the rate of change is now so steep that the opportunity for butterly catastrophes increases because the ability to understand, much less control change, diminishes as on-demand world marginalizes everything. We are only worth the time we can afford to spend on thinking straight – and that is becoming ever smaller.