Obsolete Technology

Obsolete technology is a critical thing to understand. People who do understand it would know how long to keep a piece of equipment and when to part with it and be able to avoid making costly mistakes. An obsolete piece of technology is one in which the useful life is gone and one that fails to interact well with similar modern equipment, is less efficient and is hardly upgradeable. It could be argued that a technology may be useful to one person while another considers it to be useless but there must be some international benchmark by which everything is measured and judged. For example, a firm in one country may decide to ship some old equipment to some poor community where the citizens consider the technology to be state-of-the-art. Isn’t that “new found” technology still obsolete? Yes, it is because when spare parts for that donated equipment are needed to maintain it they may not be available and that technology may not be as efficient as the more recent models.

In fact, new technology emerges to do a far better job so the earlier piece of equipment is no longer preferred. It means therefore that the speed at which more improved technology emerges determines the rate at which competing technologies become obsolete. We say that computers generally have a useful life of five years but when new and more efficient ones are made, we quickly dispose what we had as inadequate and purchase new ones. The five year life span becomes irrelevant. We must therefore measure the usefulness of technology using several units of measurements which must include: life span, availability of better models and equipment efficiency among other factors. This will help use to better understand at what point something becomes obsolete. I expect the life span of most technological pieces to shorten considerably.