>>The human body and its ills has traditionally not been the fast moving target that tech has been.

Wow. OK, consider the human genome: vendors can't just declare something that suits them and push it on the market, it has to be validated *before* anybody gives it any credence, after which its significance truly can be game changing. The point is that vendors cannot come up with some change, get a fanboi Mexican Wave going and then start deprecating the status quo to provoke change. That's regarded as experimentation on patients and practitioners. Practitioners decide what they will use and a vendor who tries to force change will run straight into the FDA, JCAHO and all sorts of others established precisely to prevent self-serving vendor activity, or future mistakes like Thalidomide. The link to customer benefit is direct, measurable and reproducible with the vendors needing to convince practitioners and investigators rather than laying down the law. Dragan likes to assert collusion between doctors and vendors, but there's always a few in every industry.

>>Our field has a lot of instances where needs changed but some developers kept insisting this did not require new approaches to handle those needs. If your tool was the best thing anyone had seen for writing desktop datacentric LAN apps with limited UI expectations then you should be able to continue to use that tool to write asynchronous responsive UI apps against data stores exposed on the web and do all the tests etc that are now considered best practice. And I think that mindset caused a lot of folks to waste a lot of time trying to ignore the future (MS and the internet) or try to solve this years problem with the tools of their salad days.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with old. Penicillin is one of the oldest (and cheapest) antibiotics out there but if it does the job, it gets used. I could also point to Digitalis for heart conditions whose first recorded use was in 1785 and which has been used in tablet form for >100 years. In 2013, patients who don't do well on newer fancier drugs often end up on Digoxin. I agree that in IT, Digoxin would be regarded as a profoundly obsolete useless option that could not possibly still be any good compared to something more interesting invented yesterday without proof at 20 times the price. Medical practitioners also like cool new stuff but patient welfare dictates that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

>>I had no agenda asking what kind of development you were doing or supervising personally other than genuine curiousity. My impression had been you were rather convinced cross platform approaches that allowed for responsidve UI and diverse backends were not just a fad,

That's projection dude. But it's simply not about me: my anecdote is useless because it's about as atypical as it gets.

>>Again, I am only stating my personal preference for rapid change and constant evolution of ideas. I get bored easily and probably feel at a competitive disadvantage when the race goes to the dilligent over dilletante. <s>

Your words, Charles. The customer base has been prepared to pay high prices for this sort of recreation, but it won't be forever. FWIW I meet all sorts of interesting people as I wander around: last week I met an investor dude doing very advanced speech and banking IT work. He told me the trend amongst the "smart" players is not to employ US developers. Too expensive and self-referential (his words) compared to hard workers in Romania. Don't blame the messenger.