Data Smog:Surviving the Information Glut
By David Shenk
Chapter 5

The Thunderbird Problem
And other "upgrade" pitfalls


There's an old episode of Gilligan's Island, I seem to recall, wherein our hapless castaways come upon a boat to take them back to civilization. But when they overload their rescue craft with unnecessary baggage (topped off with Thurston Howell III's trunk o'welath), it sinks about twenty second after they cast off. After a frantic swim in the lagoon, it is back to the tropic island mist for Skipper, Little Buddy, and the gang.

Whether one is packing a suitcase or making a sundaye at a self-serve ice cream bar, the temptation to keep piling on is often irresistible, and is invariably followed by feelings of deep regret. When it comes to information technology, though, add-ons are a special problem, with especially vexing consequences.

Adam, a friend from high school, became an expert in computer assisted journalism and wound up with a job at Microsoft. I flew out to Seattle to visit him for a few days. He took me into his office one morning - yes, we stopped at Starbucks on the way - to introduce me to some of Microsoft's programming lumminaries. At te nd of the day, I put down my reporter's notebook and shifted back into consumer mode as Adam took me on a swing through the Microsoft store, where employees are able to buy software for 80 percent off.

Eighty Percent! The fantasy shopping spree lives in Redmund, Washington. My eyes darted around the store maniacally and my pulse raced as I snatched up stacks of CD-ROMs and software upgrades from each aisle. I could see no logical stopping point, so I relied on the limits of Adam's patience. Among other items, I bought myself Microsoft Word 6.0, yet another upgrade of the program I had been using for ten years or so (I began with 1.0, and over the years had upgraded to 2.somehting, 3.1, then 4.0, and 5.0, 5.1, and now 6). With Adam's discount ("Adam" is not his real name), Word 6.0 cost me $10. It seemed like a terrificbargain for dozens of sensational new formatting features like AutoCorrect, AutoText, 100-level undo, drag-and-drop editing, Table AutoFormat, and something called "Wizards."

But it turned out to be wasted cash. After I took the time to install all thirteen high-density disks onto my hard drive (the previous upgrade had been just six disks), I found Word 6.0 to be painfullyslow nad cumbersome. The upgrade was advertised as having a "built-in intelligence that senses what you want to do and produces the desired result, making routine tasks automatic and complex jobs easier." But all the new belsl and whistles had transformed the program I depended on for basic word processing into a veritable zoo of capabilities that were cumbersome to learn, and had slowed down even the most elemental fucntions, like opening a file and printing, to a painful crawl. This minor fiasco raised the obvious question to my mind: If it wasn't broke, why had they tried so hard to fix it?

The answer, I discovered, is that upgrades are the lifeblood of the information industry. Understanding the rammifications of this fact is critical to a complete comprehension of the new social dynamics of the information society.

When I visited K., I told him about my disappointment with Word 6.0. He nodded in recognition. "Oh, yes," he said, "you're talking about the Thunderbird Problem."

The Thunderbird Problem is an industry term for the dark side of the upgrade phenomenon, named after the excuciating transformation of the legendary Ford Thunderbird over the last several decades. When first introduced in the mid-1950s, the T-bird was a sleek, adventurous, charming automobile. But the nature of the American automobil business was such that no design was allowed to last. Instead, cars were changed significantly enough each year so that customers would feel compelled to "trade-up" to feel current.

This strategy of "planned obsolescence" focused not on real improvement, but on the superficial appearance of progress. Quality was sacrificed to the sales imperative. Bit by bit, with no one looking out for the integrity of the vehicle itself, the original charm and grace of many cars were stripped away. The T-bird is by no means an aberration; it just happens to be the one of the best illustrations of the problem.

And so it is wth the saftware and hardware, K. explained. A product starts out reasonably simple and smart, but in the effort to convince consumers to upgrade,a long string of bells and whistles are added on year after year, to the point were both the aesthetics and the performance of the orignal product are often diluted.

Dean, my friend at Apple, was also immediately familiar with the notion when I visited him in his office. "That's exactly what happened with the Macintosh," he said. Each year, Apple had expanded the capabilities of the machine to the point where, in Dean's opinion, it had lost its essence. One obvious example of this was that the last generation of Powerbooks, which were suppose to be many times more powerful and speedy than my two-year-old machine, came so loaded down with software that they were actually much slower.

The Thunderbird Problem is endemic to the era of superabundance. We upgrade because we so easuly can. In our enthusiasm for the next magical phase, we lose sight of the original purpose. We add and add and add until one day we find that we've got a trunk full of useless trinkets onboard and the ship is taking water.

Mostly, this beastly situation continues because it's terrifically profitable. Planned computer obsolescence reaps billions of dollars every year for programmers, manufacturers, marketers, adn public relations professionals. Consumers do not, after all, ever have the benefit of the following experience:

[PLACE: ACME MICROCOMPUTERS OUTLET]

JOE SALESGUY: Beauty, ain't she?
JEREMY CUSTOMER: What are the specs on this machine?
JOE: One hundred and fifty megahertz. One-gigabyte hard drive. Built in 28.8 fax modem and four-speed CD-ROM. With the rebate, you can take it home today for $1,800.
JEREMY: That sounds reasonable to me. I'll take it.
JOE: Great, they'll ring you up at the desk, you can pick up your machine at the counter on the right, and we'll see you again in about eighteen months.
JEREMY: Excuse me?
JOE: Oh, sure, you'll be back before you know it to get a much faster machine with more storage for about the same money. This baby will still work like a charm, but it'll feel real sluggish compared to the new ones coming into your office. Colleagues will point at yours and call it a dinosaur. Then one day you'll hear about the latest version of your favorite software, and you'll see an asterisk noting that it won't work on your machine without a lot more RAM. Meanwhile, the twenty-speed CD-ROM drives will be coming out, making your four-speed seem pretty pathetic...

No clerk will ever acknowledge such an unrefined truth in a real sales pitch, of course. But everyday, as people purchase software and hardware, speedy obsolescence is the subtext. Remember Windows 95? As Microsoft introduced its much-anticipated system upgrade, they were able to generate so much interest (with the help of Jay Leno and the Rolling Stones) that some computer stores opened up at midnight to sell the first copies, just as music stores occasionally do for big pop records.

But how hot was Windows 95 in 1996? if it felt like old news, that's because Microsoft had planned it that way. Sure enough, an upgrade - Windows 98 - will roll out shortly after this book's publication. Since Microsoft, like all the others, makes most of its profit on upgrades, the real product isn't hardware or software, but information anxiety. In order to satisfy Wall Street's short-term outlook, the corporate challenge becomes convincing the consumer to pay for upgrades as often as possible.


The Fifth Law of Data Smog
What they sell is not information technology, but information anxiety.
The sales goal of the information industry is to convince consumers that, whatever they have, it isn't enough. It works. At the beginning of this decade, IBM found that people were replacing their computers every five years. By 1995 computer users were considering their machines obsolete in just two years. Juding by the current rate of return, it is estimated that by the year 2005, the nation will have tossed 150 million computers into the scrap bucket. So, while we pretend to buy a machine only for its technical capabilities, there is apparentely a powerful hidden social component to each purchase keeping up with the Joneses.

This is what's behind the inexplicable disdain for machines just a few years old. I've got this 286 in my closest - it's a dinosaur. What two years ago was a critical piece of machinery now seems like useless plastic. We act as though the machine has actually lost its technical abilities, when of course it is we, not the machine, who have changed. What else besides effective marketing and intense social pressure could sway our own perceptions so dramatically in sucha short period of time?

Even theough the machines themselves could last for years and years, computers are socially perishable. To really particiapate in the information revolution, one must abide by the tenets of Moore's Law - the industry's rule of thumb that computer processing speed doubles every two years or so - and one must "upgrade" machinery approximately that often. Which I have done, faithfully:
  1. Apple II PLus (52K Floppy drive, 48K RAM, 6502 processor), 1982
  2. Macintosh (400K floppy, 128K RAM, 68000 processor), 1984
  3. Mac512 (same, with 512K RAM), 1985
  4. Mac SE30 (800K floppy, 10 MB hard drive, 68030 processor), 1988
  5. Mac Classic (20MB hard drive, 1.4MB floppy, 2MB RAM, 68000 processor), 1989
  6. Powerbook 140 (40MB hard drive, 1.4MB floppy, 4MB RAM, 68030 processor), 1991
  7. Upgrade: 80 MB hard drive, 1992
  8. Powerbook 180 (same, with 120MB hard drive), 1993
  9. Upgrade: 340 MB hard drive, 1995
I offer this list not as a boast but as a mea culpa. While personal computers have been relatively inexpensive compared to their costlier, bulky predecessors in the 1960s and '70s, the pace of improvements is such that the personal computer habit has been anything but cheap. Computer junkies sometimes jokingly discuss the astronomic costs of their lifestyle by distinguishing "computer-dollars" for "real-dollars." "Did you ever notice how, for anything else, $300 is a lot of money?" a friend remarks as we drool over CD-ROM drives in a computer store. "But in the computer universe, we don't think twice about spending it." As with exotic sports cars and renowned paintings on the auction block, the price is not measured in rational terms. And while personal computers are touted for their cost-effectiveness, the cost of keeping up with the pace of change is extroadinarily expensive.

This social perishability of computer technology isn't merely a problem for computer enthusiasts like me. The momentum driving me to upgrade my hardware and software every few months is part of the same force pushing your health care premiums through the roof. As technology accelerates the pace of change for every industry dependent on it, it also extracts a seemingly constant stream of "upgrade" fees for new software and hardware, and for worker retraining. Not far from the Microsoft campus near Seattle is another software titan, Oracle Corporation. Oracle, the second largest software company, has profited handsomely from the sales of its database management and client/server software, and is now considered a top Internet player and one of the shrewdest scouts for future opportunities in our emerging information economy. In the summer of 1996, Oracle instituted a major shift in its business in order to take advantage of what it saw emerging as a potential ly lucrative market of the future: technology-driven inexperience. "We see a training gap," said Oracle's Bill Seawick. "Technology is coming at such a fantastic pace that people have to learn new technologies every three or four months."

Millions of recently "downsized" Americans, rendered obsolete and jobless by technology, would not contest Seawick's assesment. Neither would the U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who has made worker-retraining a personal crusade, warning that in today's economyeveryone can expect to change jobs an average of seven or eight times in their lifetime. Job stability, Reich says, is a thing of the past.

There is also a social cost to upgrade mania that cannot be measured in dollars. The blistering pace of life today, driven by technology and the business imperative to improve efficiency, is somehting to behold. We often feel life going by much, much faster than we wish, as we are carried forward from meeting to meeting, call to call, errand to errand. We have less time to ourselves, and are expected to improve our performance and output year after year. If life were a cartoon, as it sometimes seems to be, we would be the breathless Wile E. Coyote, forever chasing the Road Runner but never concluding the chase (<beep beep>).

Upgrade training may be the growth industry of the future, but it on't heal all the scars from the ever-accelerating pace of change. There is a psychic consequence to this blistering pace. When Americans tell pollsters and therapists that they feel they are losing constrol over the basic structures of their lives, it's partly because they are. The ferocious upgrading of the machinery all around us undermines our sense of security and continuity.

Finally, upgrade mania also undermines our technical grasp of history. In the National Archives in College Park, Maryland (just outside of Washington, D.C.), a massive amount of government data is being stockpiled in electronic form, but with great trepidation. Safely warehoused in temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms, the data will be intact for hundreds of not thousands of years to come. But will our children be able to access it? "You can get an optical disk that may last for a hundred years," says Archives Director of Electronic Storage Kenneth Thibodeau of the dilema facing all modern archivists. "But in ten years you won't be able to find a drive to read the thing." The technology changes so quickly that librarians, archivists, and corporate systems managers will forever be playing catch-up, at enormous effort and expense.

It makes wonder whether whatever we are all chasing is worth the chase itself.

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