While I feel Dave's 'pains', some perspective here might help…

Companies generally want to have their products maintain 'competitive'. If their products aren't competitive due, eg., to competing products offering greater functionality or other desirable traits at a consummate price point, they can stand to lose market share. This drives 'product improvement'.

Companies that have technical staff on their payroll (think: several Dave Joneses in a department) want to see a 'Return on Investment' (where their 'investment' in this case is salary). Dave Joneses (and other homo sapiens specimens) appreciate being paid, so they 'innovate' and arrive at new ways to solve and create new versions of things. Sometimes external management forces are imposed on the design engineers. Those forces can sometimes be misguided and often management do get it wrong. On the other hand, they also often do get it right, but we don't complain about these instances…

Another driver to create new products can be changing regulations (particularly in the area of product safety) and component parts obsolescence. In such cases, the drive to create a new version of a product is often unavoidable.

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -” ― Heraclitus

What drives change? Our insatiable and innate competitive nature.

On balance, its better not to stagnate, IMHO – it keeps the neurons firing. I should know – for my (apparently voluminous) sins, I'm a LINUX sysadmin, where something fundamental changes with each and every release with attendant increasing complexity and forcing a re-learning of long-learned skills. I probably wouldn't want it any other way, though…

I noticed in the video – Dave's driving something more recent than a Model T…? Seems it might have…seat belts…? Airbags…? ABS…? A radio…? Crumple zones…?

There you go: marketing – I hate it !!! :):):):)

My family left Sunicrust Bakeries a few months before they were bought out by Goodman Fielder. Within the span of 2 years, their marketing changes to the product changed their market share in this region from 95% to about 10%. Fail….

this makes me remeber about the pickit 3 issue… I'm ones of those who experienced that DOWNGRANDE version of the pickit 2

mm windows xp-win vista

For future drive-time blogs you might want to consider locking the exposure settings on the camera so you don't fade into the shadows. Nice blog otherwise!

I usually don't like changes too. I think the managers are obsessed with the innovation cycle, sometimes it helps but sometimes it breaks the product.