Adventures in Tech

At Microsoft we get to refresh our desktops and laptops every couple of years. Most people jump at the opportunity to get the latest equipment, but I usually don’t. I don’t like migrating from an older machine to a newer one and delay the refresh for as long as I can, preferably until the equipment dies, or goes out of compliance. After approving many equipment upgrades for my team this year, I decided to upgrade my monitor. I always had a single small monitor for my desktop, and never liked the dual monitor setup, or what I jokingly call the “flight simulator” setup with 4 monitors—three side by side, and one on top. My team swears by the productivity increase of seeing everything they need at once, and I believe them.  However, for me I was weaned on Unix terminals, Emacs, and command line tools, so I learned to live within the confines of a small screen. Nonetheless, getting a larger and crisper display was appealing, so I took the plunge and ordered a 38-inch monitor.

Last week I made an impulse buy. I was at the Microsoft store trying to pass time while my kids were enjoying painting on the surface laptops and playing games on the Xbox. I walked around the store in search of something interesting and stopped at the phone display. The display had the newest family of the Samsung Galaxy phones, preloaded with Microsoft business applications. I picked up the biggest model and started to play with it. I liked its bigger edge-to-edge screen and the quality of the display. I must have enjoyed it very much, because I tried a lot of my favorite sites and applications, and compared how easy it was to read on the bigger screen than on my smaller iPhone X screen. I was so absorbed in the comparisons, that I did not see the sales associate approaching. She was very cordial, and started to chat about the differences between the two eco-systems—Android and iOS, and that most of the applications that I used including work applications ran on both. Then she

Twelve years ago, when I bought my car, my decision criteria were simple. I wanted a car that is fun to drive, had good reliability, and was gas efficient; traits that were missing in my prior car. I did not put a lot of weight on the technological innovations the car had; I was happy with a good navigation system, a CD player that held multiple CDs, and a backup camera that made parallel parking easier. At the time, almost all car manufacturers provided undifferentiated versions of these capabilities, with minor tweaks to the user interface, which made my selection a lot easier. Over the years as the technology advanced, these originally innovative features started to feel obsolete. It was almost impossible to upgrade the hardware with newer and faster components, and software did not have a better story.   Only if either had issues or bugs, did the manufacturer offer an upgrade, through vehicle recalls or maintenance, or through map update CDs on a yearly basis, that captured