Nurturing inflexibility to change in a user—especially a student—is setting them up for failure in a world of frequent and sudden change.

Anecdote: I had a friend in college. Visually impaired - tunnel vision and a degrading retina. Takes him a good few seconds to locate things on familiar UI. New UI is hell. I know because I was by his side all through college.

Your comment makes it look as if you never worked with someone who suffers due to needless design changes.

I work in high school education. I've dealt with inflexibility from staff and students alike. When I started we never ran software updates precisely because people didn't like change.

I changed that policy and moved to tracking upstream as closely as I can manage. While it was very hard at first, users have adapted and become better at adapting to new changes quickly. Five years later, I do not see nearly as many "this changed and I don't know how to do it anymore"-type questions as I used to. The initial break was quite hard, but I'm very glad I did it.

There's a difference between people being just plain stubborn, and people with an actual disability that hampers them.

Indeed. I have worked in assistive technology consulting, and it is very difficult to keep up with all of the "upgrades".

It is clear that we value shiny bullshit more than being accessable and inclusive.

And nobody can even make the case that cutting off more and more people from the web even benefits us.

Technology should serve its users, not the other way around and change-for-changes sake is an extremely bad strategy.

"change-for-changes sake is an extremely bad strategy."

Yup. It's also the go-to strategy for startups and tech companies in general once they have run out of real ideas for their product and one of the quickest ways tech companies' products degrade into shit.

I agree. However, the reality is that software changes constantly. We can accept change and move on with life, or fight change forever.

Not everybody is in a position to 'accept and move on with life', their lives are challenging enough without constant change.

The fact that us techies tend to downplay those challenges does not make them any less real for others.

Why should anyone accept planned obsolescence?

Well maybe companies that create this stuff should be more flexible in accommodating the users.

It's not our responsibility to work around someone Else's updates. If something works now, why should it be changed because it's more convenient for Google?