Compatibility blues

After about 10 years of faithful service, my home PC refused to sputter into life last week, just as my daughter tried to access the Internet for urgently-needed school project information.

The diagnosis was that the hard drive needed replacing. This was not unreasonable after all that time, and I thought - how much could a hard drive cost? While I was at it, I thought I would augment the 64MB memory too.

Unfortunately, when it came down to it, the issue was not cost, but compatibility. No hard disk available from the suppliers is compatible with my PC`s motherboard and the kind of memory I need is no longer manufactured.

The next logical step, or so I thought, was to build a new machine and use as many of the components as possible from the existing machine to save costs. Another pipedream! A new hard drive necessitated a new motherboard, which meant I was not able to re-use my system case, keyboard, soundcard, or mouse!

The net result is that I am to take delivery soon of a brand new PC that far exceeds my needs and my budget all because one component of my perfectly adequate for my needs computer had reached the end of its life.

This set me thinking about the many instances in which technological change has forced involuntary and unnecessary expense on consumers.

I love technology and the life-enhancing functionality it can deliver, but must the newer, faster, higher-quality incarnations of things be so incompatible with what has gone before?

Warwick Ashford, Journalist, ITWeb

Many people around the world were perfectly happy with the atmospheric sound of vinyl records and the superior video recording capability of beta technology, but they were forced to "upgrade" as manufacturers withdrew support to drive the market towards compact disc and VHS.

The next thing to start disappearing was VHS in favour of DVD. Already there are certainly billions invested in CD and DVD, but with blue laser technology gaining momentum every day, we could soon find ourselves being forced into "upgrading" to higher density formats.

Don`t get me wrong. I love technology and the life-enhancing functionality it can deliver, but must the newer, faster, higher-quality incarnations of things be so incompatible with what has gone before? Is it so unreasonable to expect that after a mere 10 years one should be able to replace or upgrade a system component without buying a whole new system?

The only way things will ever change is if there is a shift of power from the manufacturers to the consumers. Now I don`t mean small consumers like me, but big corporate organisations and governments.

I am confident the big players have surely been forced to upgrade prematurely or unnecessarily when system components needed upgrading or replacement, but they have done so without a murmur, further entrenching the power of manufacturers to dictate to the market.

I hate to think of the billions in corporate and government budgets that have certainly been wasted in this way.

For the benefit of all consumers, we need the big players to unite and demand backward-compatibility in hardware to equal the kind of backward-compatibility we are beginning to see from major software vendors.

Blue laser is an exciting new frontier because it means that the storage capacity of CDs and DVDs will be dramatically increased. Blue light has a much shorter wavelength than the red light used for first-generation CD and DVD players.

With a shorter wavelength, blue lasers allow for much smaller pits to represent the binary information on the discs, increasing storage capacity for the same area by four times. Imagine being able to fit Peter Jackson`s Lord of the Rings trilogy on a single high-quality DVD! Blue laser will make this a reality.

Now this sounds great until one remembers there are already three distinct blue laser formats that have been developed in competition to each other. Naturally, like VHS and Beta, none of these blue laser formats are interoperable.

In this age of greater co-operation, we can only hope that efforts to develop world standards in wireless and radio frequency identification will influence the blue laser contingent to do the same.

Rather than rushing to market, developers should get together to develop a single, superior blue laser standard for use in backward-compatible dual red and blue laser players.

Okay, I know it`s idealistic, but I do think it`s time hardware manufacturers got realistic. They have been in the driving seat far too long. The sooner consumers stop tolerating the abuse of decades, the better.

Perhaps my stars are right and I will always be a dreamer, but I like to imagine a time when there is a shift in power and our descendents are able to buy only the technology they need, when they need it.