Remember when voice activation and talking computers were touted as the Next Big Thing?
Some geek in my office set it up so he could open programs and stuff by voice commands, and the computer would respond with "yes, master". That lasted less than a day, until everyone else in the office threatened to stomp on his microphone headset if he didn't shut his computer the f*ck up.
I've been working in the software industry for a long time, and it's made me cynical. Software is a marketer's dream, because it's a product that a) you can sell with with known defects and not be sued, b) is basically a consumable because it's guaranteed to quickly become obsolete, and c) is intangible and therefore lends itself to vague emotion-driven marketing methods.
Case in point: 99% of computer users do not need 64-bit computing. In fact, most of what users do on a computer (email, web surfing, games) don't even need a 32-bit instruction set. But here we are, good consumers that we've been trained to be, tossing out perfectly functional products and re-purchasing new equivalents, only to repeat the process again in a year or two. The brainwashing works so well that some indoctrinees have been known to endlessly parrot the great need for 64-bit this and that, using very large fonts to stress the urgency.