Microsoft's Second Mistake: Boring Upgrades is part II of an eWeek opinion piece.

"In my life, I remember wanting Office 98 to get long file names, or was that Office 95? Office XP tried to make interesting but little-used features easier to find, a strategy reversed by Office 2003, where a nice upgrade to Outlook became the star. None of these set the world afire.

If you are on an unfinished platform like the Tablet PC, then every update is important, but that's because you are using a work that's truly still in progress. Windows XP was a worthwhile upgrade, as was Windows 98 Second Edition, but XP really required new hardware. These days it seems OS upgrades are much more interesting than application upgrades.

There was, of course, a time in the barely remembered past when every upgrade was necessary because all of desktop computing, indeed computing itself, was still in its infancy. But as technology has matured, customers are finding that what they already own works just fine. That means software often changes only when hardware has to be replaced. That can stretch the upgrade cycle out to three, even four years."

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