As far as upgrades, it never fails to amaze me that some will do it
just for the "latest and greatest."
I hear you loud an clear. MS knows how we feel too - that's why they
cut support for older OS's and products to force upgrades. That's
why they force hardware vendors to only sell the latest versions.
THey want to force customers to upgrade because the features
themselves don't really sell the new products. I think it holds true
for a lot of their software. For example, MS-Office. There is really
nothing in Office 2003, or Xp, or 2000 that was not in Office 97, or
even 95. The only thing they've done is to make it "easier" to share
documents between programs and people. Note the quotes around
"easier". They've done it at the expense or an incredibly convoluted
solution that not only takes twice the footprint but results in
*problems* sharing content between applications half the time. As they
automate more, the obfuscate more. And, when they tell is "XP has
new drivers", they are really just saying "we didn't write a new
driver for win2K because we want you to buy XP instead".
Why have they done this ? Because (example) there's really not much
they can do with MS-Word that has not already been done in terms of
word processing. True, they could make it a much better layout program
and solve some of the bugs, but there's no upper market and bugs are
hard to fix. So instead they sell everyone on how great and wonderful
the new product is. If you go look at the actual side-by-side from MS,
you'll see that there's little new content in the latest release
except sharing features for large corporate environments (few of whom
use that stuff anyway)... and that side by side is from MS.
But, I rant
. If you have a need for some XP features, or if you
want to be consistent with your other systems, or you just want to use
the latest software because it make you more comfortable, go for it.
You should use whatever floats your boat.
