The better mousetrap. Just when you don’t need it.

Some­one always seems eager to build the bet­ter mouse­trap. It cer­tainly wouldn’t be good news to all the mice were it not that the term is used mostly as a metaphor. But peo­ple are striv­ing to improve objects, to make them bet­ter, to come up with an “improved” ver­sion. All kinds of rea­sons exist for the need to improve but one with a cyn­i­cal mind would sus­pect money is a great fac­tor. It does seem that way with the “wares” of com­put­ers. You know–hardware, soft­ware, under­wear. Well, who knows if com­put­ers have undies but per­haps you get the point.

Every year or so some tech com­pany comes up with an improved ver­sion of this or that. Look at Microsoft. You got your Win­dows, Win­dows 2000, Win­dows XP, Win­dows Vista, Win­dows to the World, Dirty Win­dows and Closed Windows.

But some­thing as sim­ple as Yahoo Mail. It’s been the same for thou­sands of years in Inter­net time. Now they are get­ting around to improv­ing it, to change it. And wouldn’t you know that change has to take place at pre­cisely the time you most need that lit­tle piece of tech­no­log­i­cal wiz­ardry to flaw­lessly per­form the mis­sion that it has done so well for so long? The prob­lem is that you have to take time now to learn, or retrain, as to how it functions.

Maybe some­one will come up with a bet­ter ver­sion of time. That’s it: Time 2.0. It sounds down­right techie.