To the genesis:

I fully agree with your sentiment. My ideal form factor would be 76 (or even 73) keys with small speakers (for personal monitoring and low-volume practice), weighing under 35 lbs. Forget floppy disks - just give us USB A and B ports to connect thumb-drives or external USB devices. A hard drive would be useful, but not necessary.

Instead of saying how hard it is to make arrnagers, the manufacturers should do things right the first time - it will cost them much less in the long run.

I think Roland and Korg (and perhaps others) should take their que from Yamaha - they have developed a good operating system some 10 years ago, and it remains basicaly unchanged from PSR 7000. A Yamaha player would find his way around Tyros2 as easily as around PSR3000. By reusing their good operating system, Yamaha is able to derive higher profits from each unit sold. Even if the improvement is only in the quality of sounds and styles (forgetting the goofy corners on T2), the low learning curve makes it easy to upgrade. I bet if Roland (and Korg) were not trying to nickel-and-dime the users by saving a few buttons, and had reused the OS of E70 (the most user-friendly Roland ever built - remember it way back from 1991 ?), it would have cost them a lot less to roll out each new model, and keeping customers happy, they'd be able to sell a lot more instruments. Similarly, Korg should have kept the user-friendliness of I30 in its PA series.

Regards,
Alex