Dave McGuire wrote: As far as "people demand decreasing prices" and "people demand more functionality" etc...I hear that all over the place, but I never seem to see any people lined up outside Seagate's doors demanding that they make bigger drives, I never see people lined up outside Intel's HQ demanding higher clock rates etc etc. What I DO see is manufacturers constantly DELIVERING increased functionality, and sometimes decreasing prices, and customers eating it up because they have to have the "latest thing" in order to feel good about themselves. You see...I am (in this context) the customer, the money in my wallet is MINE, and *I* decide what I want to spend it on and when...and *I* decide when the products I have are no longer capable of doing their jobs. It is wrong for a manufacturer to tell me that "thing XYZ" is "no longer suitable for use" SIMPLY AND ONLY BECAUSE they've started selling something new and would like me to buy one. Where I come from, that's called a lie. Perhaps I'm expecting too much from the business world, especially in the USA nowadays, but that's crossing a line that should never have been crossed. -Dave Billy Responds: Dave, you obviously have had some bad experiences with obsolescence. I don't know what they were, but I have NEVER seen an OEM change products "SIMPLY AND ONLY BECAUSE" they've got something new. In fact it works the other way around - remember how Adam Osbourne killed off his company by prematurely announcing a new product? How many disk drives companies still make ST506 drives? Or SCSI? If people won't buy your product, you have to change or die. QED. One of the points I was trying to make is that it costs big bucks to develop new products. Every manufacturer I know would love to lay off the development staff and just keep making the old products. Damn engineers always expect to be paid! Get rid of them and no R&D expenses, old product well down the price curve = lots of profit, no pressure. But the world doesn't work that way. You may not see the people lined up outside Seagate's door demanding they make bigger drives. But I do - they visit us after they leave Seagate. And they give us their roadmap when they want the next drive, what features it requires down to the weight in grams, and how much they will pay and when. All vendors have to provide forward pricing, product commits, detailed schedules, design reviews, detailed testing data on the customer's systems and so on. Play the game as the customer demands or get out. Ignore the customer and die. It is extremely expensive to come out with new capacity points for drives and RAM so frequently. It has killer expenses and often involves massive infrastructure investment. Have you looked at the costs of going to 300 mm wafers to build the next generation of microprocessors? We are talking multi-billion dollar start up costs. It's clear that you feel strongly that the vendors are all out to screw you. I can't change that and won't try. But I can tell you that being in the industry is tough and making products obsolete to ship new ones is painful as hell. It is not vendors trying to screw their customers. It is people trying to stay alive in a cut throat industry. Think about how many casualties there have been in the field. Literally thousands of companies have come and gone. This list talks daily about respected companies with great technical expertise who didn't make it. And most of those died because they couldn't keep up the pace of change, not because they obsoleted their good products. Not everyone who makes electronic equipment is a villain. Billy