Although the pace of change is tremendous, it is, in most cases, supplier driven. New versions of the desktop applications suite require the latest version of the OS, that requires the latest version of the CPU, that in turn requires new memory configurations, and so on and so on. To the consumer, this cyclone of vendor-driven change is overwhelming. It has been argued, with some merit, that the WWW is a marketing phenomenon created to bolster demand for even bigger CPUs, applications and networks. It took so long and cost so much to fund, develop, install, and stabilize the system, that anything that upsets its delicate balance it hard to justify.
Incremental upgrades are possible under controlled circumstances.
However, traditional implementations of SGML have not been incremental. Rather, they have demanded that consumers make significant changes to their processes as well as to their technology infrastructure. Even worse, traditional implementations have been point solutions without context. To develop SGML documents, the consumer is asked to adopt a specialized word processor that delivers one third of the functionality at four times the price of the existing word processor. Even worse is that accessing, let alone utilizing, the so-called intelligence in the SGML is a complex task requiring sophisticated programming skills.