Soup of the Day

All change

The last two years have seen a lot of change in my personal life. I successfully completed University, was nominated for a RTS award, lost a member of our family, gained a wonderful companion, moved to Sheffield, won a RTS award, moved to Manchester, left my former employer and then started my own business. If someone told me the above two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed them for a second.

At the same time if someone told me that my Apple Mac would be powered by an Intel processor two years ago, I would have laughed them out the room. But it’s true! Not only that but Adobe brought Macromedia and Discreet purchased Alias. All these things would have seemed impossible until they actually happen - and when they do happen no-one is ever very happy about it.

But let’s stop a moment and look at Apple’s example. While we were relying on the very powerful G5 processor from IBM, processor updates were few and far between, sometimes upto 18-months before each speed boost. Now, with Intel powering our Mac’s, we are seeing new processors every six months and more exciting products as a result. Things certainly look better than they did two years ago. We can even do things with our Mac now that we never dreamed of doing before, like running two operating systems side-by-side without a performance penalty. But if you’d asked me what I thought of Apple’s decision when they announced it last summer, I remember saying I wasn’t very happy about it.

The same goes for Alias being brought by Discreet and Macromedia’s folding into Adobe, everyone assumed the worst. The applications we loved using would be destroyed and the new owners own product line would then thrive in a monopoly. Maya is still being developed by Discreet along side 3DS Max and the Maya development path is looking as healthy as ever. Dreamweaver could have been binned so that Adobe’s own GoLive software would be the only option to use, but instead Adobe are pushing Dreamweaver further and improving it’s development features, whilst re-aligning GoLive at the designer market.

So why do we fear change so much, particularly in the software market. Change is generally not received well by anyone, some fear it more than others. But when it comes to change in the computing world, it rarely is met with welcome by users. For the most part I think this is due to the fact that we all get used to applications functioning in a particular fashion and if another person or company takes over, then they might change everything we have become accustomed to and we’ll have to re-learn everything. But there is a darker force in most computing fanatics fear of change - Microsoft.

Unlike the recent mergers and aquisitions, in the 90’s Microsoft was notorious for buying up their competition and then killing off the product. They didn’t merge their R&D teams with their newly aquired developers, they silently showed them the door. For a long time this meant that small innovative companies could not survive for long and so what was the point. In the long run, I think Microsoft are now paying for this attitude as their software is generally lacking when compared to their competitors.

I was definately aposed to any form of change until recently. But as I have now come to realise, ‘change happenz‘ and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do to stop it. I didn’t want some of the changes that happened to me recently, but that changes nothing. Better to embrace the future than try and fight it.