Rosemarie Chavarria wrote, in regard to a friend of hers who insisted on staying with WinXP, "I asked him why and his answer was that it was simpler to work with."

And I can't count the times I've heard this, about way more than Windows, and thought, "No, it's not easier to work with - it's what you're used to." Win XP was an OS I loved and Microsoft has the annoying habit of alternating "good" and "bad" versions of Windows. The number of things that require manual intervention from the user in XP is huge compared to later versions, particularly Windows 7 forward. And, when it comes down to it, even in the "ugly" versions of Windows the similarities to their predecessors is at least as strong as the differences, but the differences are where people are required to learn something new.

David Moore's comments regarding those who live to be 100, or near it, really resonate with me. My grandmother died in the 1990s and was in her 90s at the time. When I think about what technology was at her birth and the amount of change she and her age cohort had to go through I am amazed. I don't know if I could be as flexible as they were. While the pace of change has picked up, particularly in the cyber world, the majority of changes I've lived through (I'm just short of 54 years old) feel to me much more like refinements on very familiar themes rather than complete divergences from what came before. That was not true for my grandparents at all, and my parents experienced more revolutionary changes than I have, too. I think my only two revolutions were the introduction of the personal computer and the ascendance of the internet.

Brian