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Believe it or not the wheelbarrow was considered modern technology at one point.

Software is fixed cost to create and near-free to distribute. Sure there are tiny cloud costs for running things and maybe you need a couple engineers to fix bugs, but the subscription pricing model doesn’t fit this.

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Yeah, your grandfather was still respectable to the average person in his class/social group. Now it's really hard to imagine someone being able to engage socially without having technology of some form.

Fixed cost to create, sure. Not fixed cost to keep up to date, running on the current version of OS, hardware. The basic design of a simple wheelbarrow has not needed to change since its invention. A wheelbarrow made 30 years ago will still work just fine. Almost no software written 30 years ago will still work on modern systems without someone doing additional work to support it. And for the few that do, no one wants to run the 1990s version. They want to run the 2020s version.

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