Youth / younger people
that are much younger than me are good at using the technology or at least the social media part. My 30 something kids do not fully understand when the WiFi goes dead or drastically slows down. Can they fix it? Many times with a great deal of research and effort.
When they are consuming all the bandwidth due to downloads, etc they like most kids do not understand that there are thruput limitations. Try to get a stable thruput running Logmein at a coffee shop. Young adults can run the applications that they use very, very well. Better than I will ever be able to. How those applications work over the network and all the limitations that go with it not likely.
Even todays coders are very, very dumb in this respect. One customer of mine had a group designing a client / server application. Worked well in HQ with 100/1000 to the desktop. When it was put in the field running over a 256Kb link it failed. Why? Well they put very tight response times in the server side. If the client didn't respond in so many milliseconds then the server would drop them. The timers needed to be set up to several seconds to handle the limited thruput of a 256 Kb link. Don't think that such bandwidth limitations exist today? Look at the upload speed of many DSL and lite cable services.
What we may be seeing is a shift in what the help desk does. Less of OS and application assistance and more into the infrastructure to support the applications.
