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Has technology made life easier, harder or just given us different problems?

While one technology advances a rival technology advances to halt it. It should be a liberating thing that we have digital media players but it's not. If all players ran on the same formats or played all formats we'd have few problems. The problem is the record companies and the player manufacturers will not share their customers and play nicely like good little globalized maniacal corporations. But it's not just media players. There are compatability issues with so many things these days. HD-DVD vs Blu Ray ATRAC vs iTunes Windows Vista - history repeats itself. Will the corporations will sell more goods if we the consumers don't have to worry about compatibility? Do you play the brand loyalty game just to prevent these issues?

Public Comments

1. Consumers go with what's easiest to use and with what's most available. With endless corporate mergers, everything leads to the same monopolic road. It's just a matter of time before everything's compatible with everything else, or else fall by the way of the 8 track or the Beta or the LaserDisc
2. No. 3 It's a hoot watching history repeating itself over and over, whilst we, poor suckers, just lap it all up. Take computers, I had a Commodore 64 in the beginning of the 80's, got to enjoy fooling around with it and graduated to the first Apple Mac in the UK in 85. That machine had about 64k of RAM and about 640 k of hard drive, and I could do just about anything I wanted to do then, or now. Now, my newest acquisition is a HP laptop, with 1.7 ghz processor, 100 gigs hard, 1 meg RAM and so on and so on. Does is get me going any quicker ? Not really, it's a lot fancier, graphics sound etc, but i still sit here watching the grass grow while the infernal machine machinates. 1964 New York World's Fair. My first automatic door. I was so fascinated by it that I must have gone backwards and forwards a hundred times, what do I do now ? When an automatic door fails to open quickly enough I swear at it !! We are a weird lot, us humans, but I still get a laugh out of being one.....well almost.
3. Don`t talk silly just because things are improving or updating doesn`t mean you have to have the latest product. I keep up to date with video games because of the enjoyment they give me but I won`t buy a PS 3 as I have a 360 and I am happy with that. I download music for free and see no reason to buy either a HD dvd or blue ray as i am happy with dvd just relax and enjoy. I have no brand loyalty tho would choose the best value for money Vista is well overpriced so I will wait for it to become more reasonable. Ps surely things improving is a good thing