Technology Turn-Off Time?

“Are all the latest technology toys worth the trouble? One reader recently explained why he’s decided to just stop using broadband, PDAs, high-end cell phones and on-line bill payment.

“Essentially — if anything has to talk to anything else — I avoid it,” the reader wrote. “Because it won’t. Or it won’t without a lot of coaxing. Or an upgrade. Or a separate service charge. Or the moon being in the right phase, you standing on the left foot, and reciting Shakespeare. In fact, a lot of my ‘time saving tools’ have been costing so much time spent fixing glitches caused by ‘computer errors’ on the part of software or the institution that I’ve dropped…

High Speed Internet…PDAs…High-End Cell phones…Online bill payment…

I am well accustomed to making disparate devices talk to one another,” he notes. ” I started off in college hybridizing a Minuteman missile warhead and an AD5 computer. I did robotics design. It’s not that I can’t make it work, it’s just too time consuming, and I no longer have the time to kill. And the lack of reliability for all of this stuff — it fails when you can least afford the cost or the delay — has caused me to shift reliance to less susceptible methods. Let the kids play with it. The business people aren’t using it anymore for the reasons above, and no longer pay for it. Meanwhile, the software companies, secure in the knowledge they have us by the short hairs, blindly move forward with consumer exploitation approaches that will bring the whole industry down around them. One of the reasons the economy is dropping is that new startups can’t startup, because of all the new laws protecting the established and larger companies. New innovations die in the land of protectionism caused by these laws, and because consumers are finding they don’t get what they pay for, and aren’t willing to pay for it anymore.”