Worth the Hype?

I am a self-admitted computer addict. Over the passing years, fascination and interest for the medium and its growing importance in the media, marketing and every darn aspect of life makes it only more indispensable. Along with the computer, its accessories and all gizmo's tiny and shiny dazzle me and I have consumed them greedily. And then my mouse brought me to All Things D where I came across some fascinating claims of John Paczkowski. He basically debouches technology and all the hype created around it.

Update -- And from what I read in the BusinessWeek 'Editor's Memo', he is not too far from the truth. It quotes --

The big story this week, of course, on BusinessWeek.com and in BusinessWeek
magazine, was the stock market, and our writers covered the whole crazy ride.
The Insider Top Story gives investors some sound advice, while in the magazine
cover story, Michael Mandel wonders how much of the post-tech bubble prosperity
was real.

This accidentally followed reading a blog item on 10 Old Computer Ads which really got me thinking. It got me thinking on the craze to own the 'latest technology' just 7 years ago. I remember what a pain floppy disks were to store all those college notes. Zip drives [or something to the same effect] were a growing rage as they claimed to store information worth 20 floppy drives! Of course, it came with its special reader et al. We had cd-roms which could only read cds, not burn them. Thankfully, I had been too broke back then to make such an inflated investment, because a year later the concept of floppy drives and disks became completely redundant.

About 4 years ago, I bought a Palm PDA, which was a state-of-the art handheld device with video, audio, voice record, office tools, pdf reader, games...I paid a fat sum for it with my new inflow of first job income. What then seemed like the coolest gadget to own, before the year was up, had turned redundant and passe, as it had no camera and couldn't make calls!

The SD card I had bought with it was a 512MB card for Rs 2000. A year later I received a half dozen flash memory cards for FREE!

Aaargghh!