The user's desire to maintain transparency is one of the major motives that underlies the individual's resistance to technological change. Consider the following examples:

• WordPerfect 5.1: There are a nontrivial number of faculty at the college who continue to use WordPerfect 5.1 as their word processor even though this edition is more than 10 years old and makes no use of modern GUI windowing. Those who remember this ancient software can also attest that its arcane function key utilization hardly makes it a user-friendly program. Those who stick with this program are largely professional writers who made the investment to become proficient in its features and who are primarily concerned with careful writing -- not the technology to operate the word processor.
  
  
• EMACS: I continue to use EMACS as my prefered editor for system administration despite the existence of newer, more user-friendly tools. Furthermore, I carry forward an EMACS key definition file that is more than a decade old. Why? Because with this configuration, my fingers know "know how to move", allowing me to think about the changes I wish to make, not how to enter them.

Technology managers often characterize these behaviors as a Luddite resistance to innovation and advocate that all users should be required to conform to the "campus standard". When viewed from the user's perspective, this debate shifts to one of contrasting values. For many users, the loss of transparency is more critical than the new features introduced in the latest software -- particularly since most mature office products long ago perfected the basic tasks. Today's feature competition lies in very exotic items that are less and less relevant to everyday tasks.