Technology and its death
Few days ago, I was reading my old emails and I discovered I was user of Google Buzz. I also remember carefully curating a list of blogs to read on Google Reader. Both of the services which were discontinued by Google.
We rely a lot on technologies, and the sad thing about technologies is that they die, often to be replaced by something better. Floppies were replaced CDs and CDs by DVDs which have now been replaced with USB drives. Orkut was replaced by Facebook and IRC by Slack. But when technologies die, an incredible amount of energy which we put in these technologies die with them. I don’t know how many letters, songs and other documents have died in a floppy disk because no one can read them now. I don’t know how many people lost contact of each other because Orkut doesn’t exist anymore. Same goes for file formats, the formats keep changing many times the new softwares maintains backward compatibility having ability to read older formats but other times the softwares themselves gets discontinued making the older files unreadable.
This is one of the reason I prefer Free and Open Source tools to proprietary tools. For example I use Zotero instead of Mendeley, both of them are tools to organize research papers. Zotero is Free and Open Source, Mendeley is proprietary. Mendeley can die tomorrow taking away hours of effort put into it. Zotero, can’t die the way the Mendeley can, even if the organization supporting its development stops its funding, I can continue its development, or I with a bunch of other folks can collect funds to support its development. If the software is useful enough, it will live for decades to come in one form or other. Vim and Emacs have lived on for more than 40 years and I’m confident they will live and thrive for another 40 years. But I cannot be express same confidence for Sublime Text.
Death of technologies and companies providing these technologies is also one of the reason I began to use the email on my own domain. Today everybody seems to use gmail, but before gmail everybody seemed to use Yahoo. Before Yahoo, there was AOL. I don’t think anybody expects google to die to anytime soon, but I don’t think at their peak anybody expected Yahoo or AOL to die either. Even if Google doesn’t die there can be other reason because of which I might want to stop using gmail. I want people to be able to contact me on the same email address for the next 40 year, for that I need to control my email address which only email on my own domain can provide. BTW I want to clarify that I don’t host my own email, I use fastmail to do so, but if I can change my email host while retaining my email address.
