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The Frustration Factor in Effect Long ago, our economy satisfied our most basic needs: food, clothing, shelter, a Pentium PC with MMX and a T1 link direct to an Mbone site. Now even Linux comes with support. None of us is hurting for creature comforts. It was back in the 1950s that marketing folks who were selling boxed cereals discovered that "eye high is buy high," and the fine art of exploiting the impulse buy was born. Soon, those marketing folks artificially created, and continue to maintain in us, a burning need for everything from Wonder bread to Winnebegos and a consumption level alien to our old-world grandparents.

But all things must end (or at least provi de diminishing returns). Our industry has an ever-increasingly difficult time convincing us to buy the next upgrade. As proof of this, I offer you multimi llionaire Andy Grove dressed up in Reynolds Wrap.

There's no need to worry though, since I don't think Bill Gates will be dressing up in anything outlandish anytime soon. The marketing geniuses have been hard at work, and they've now brought upon us a new age of purchase stimulation--the annoyance acquisition, or if you prefer, the pest purchase.

Of Attachments and E-Mail Microsoft has created a perpetual-motion money machine out of simply insisting that: Office97 files will not be downward-compatible; no human being can explain concisely how to permanently and conveniently get Office97 to store documents in a downward-compatible mode; all the ActiveX object technology engineered into Office-95 is not up to the task of accessing objects in an up-version document; and, finally, converting the file--when it works--creates a file that takes up a huge amount of disk space.

Microsoft knows this. The company also knows that all of this will get so incredibly annoying that, inevitably, organiza tions will upgrade. It will happen something like this: The executive in the corner office will become increasingly frustrated at not being able to open documents in his e-mail. Then one day he'll snap. He'll storm out of his office and throttle the nearest tech-support person, all the while shouting, "UPGRADE ME NOW!"

I don't want to be too hypocritical, however. I'm using Microsoft Word 7 now and I think the greatest contributions Microsoft has made toward easing corporate IT's life have been ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), jettisoning NetBEUI in favor of IP (finally) and leading the pack with reasonably priced, powerful server software. And in the interest of fair play, I will say that products from vendors other than Microsoft are equally faulty.

The fact that two humans (not processes) control the information, format, medium of transport and intende d recipient does not make the information-stream any less of a protocol. By introducing incompatible document types, the software vendor breaks th e protocol. Protocols are not supposed to break simply because new versions of them exist; SNA didn't and IPv6 won't.

No new protocol would ever be entertained, let alone accepted and deployed, if it couldn't be deployed conveniently without administrative overhead at different times across unaffiliated organizations. Paradoxically, we happily plunk down new applications without much thought. The only downside, after all, is productivity. For instance, how much time did that automatic grammar check really buy you?