I have been playing this game for many years now. The basic rules are: consumer buys a computer to do a particular job, that is, run particular software, such as a word processor. Software company "enhances" their program with features consumer can't live without. Consumer upgrades software, then finds his poor old computer is chugging along like an overloaded truck. Soon consumer finds his old machine too slow, and must upgrade his hardware.
While the rules of this game have been constant, the speed of play has been accelerating. Hardware technology is advancing at an exponential rate: each year's new models are twice as fast, and have double the hard-drive capacity of the previous. Software writers (programmers), given all this capacity, no longer consider efficiency. Besides, they are under pressure to produce newer, fancier products, within shorter deadlines. The result is bloated, buggy software, with more "features" than most people need or want, but that eat up hard-drive space and drag down processors. Back to step 1.
My strategy in the software game has been to always stay one step back from the "bleeding edge", and let the more adventurous players (the forwards?, my blockers?) go ahead and find all the bugs. I'll wait and buy the product when it's more stable. How do I know when that is? Easy: when the next version is announced.
But why play the game at all? Why not just ignore the new version and keep running the old standby? With some applications (word processing, accounting) you might get away with it. But, as well as the carrot-and-stick marketing ploys (eg. the pricing of the Windows upgrades), there is another powerful incentive to keep up-to-date: the internet. Your computer must be able to run not just the software you installed, but all the programs necessary to handle web pages. If you want to see a .pdf file, you must download Acrobat Reader. You can't hear an .MP3 until you have a compatable media player.
Of all software programmers, web designers are the guiltiest of over-estimating the resources of their customers. The fact that this actually limits the size of their audience doesn't seem to matter. These are programmers, not marketers. However, there's one barrier they don't seem to be considering: the limited capacity of 'phone lines. Because they are working on high-speed networks, they assume that what they see is what we get. Meanwhile, the vast majority of their audience, connecting over phone lines, find the internet gets slower every day, loading bloated web pages full of unnecesary graphics and buggy java scripts. If the trend continues, the internet will once again be available only to urban dwellers, those with access to high-speed connections
Let's hope the next leap in technology is in data communications, whether by phone line, sattelite dish or radio modem, bringing high-speed internet to rural areas. For that, I might even be brave enough to take the first move. Meanwhile, I'm not looking forward to this upgrade. I'd rather spend the time fighting bugs in my garden.