The other day at a trade show, a reader accosted me. “I can’t believe you gave speech-recognition software a good review,” he scolded. “I had an awful experience with it! I wound up sticking it in a drawer.”
I was surprised. “You’re kidding,” I said. “When was this?”
“Around 1994,” he replied.
The point, dear anecdote aficionados, is that in technology, things change. Every fast, slick and successful product today has a crude, expensive and annoying ancestor.
Take digital picture frames. A few years ago, they were novelty items: small, expensive, with coarse screens. To load pictures onto one, you had to insert your camera’s memory card and fiddle with menus. Today, a lot of those early frames lie in gadget drawers — right beside the speech-recognition headsets.
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