On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 10:19 +0100, Howard Winter wrote:
> No, it's the way Microsoft goes!  Backward compatibility used to be a big thing in computing, but M$ discovered that it means that people can just stay 
> with what they have, rather than upgrading every couple of years, which reduces M$'s profits.  One of the many reasons that I don't use their 
> software unless I have to (I do like their keyboards and mice, though!).

You are kidding right?

Most people who know me know that I'm VERY biased against Microsoft and
I try to use as few of their products as rarely as possible (Fedora Core
6 came out a few days ago, I'm going to try it on my laptop to see if I
can finally drop WinXP on it).

That said, your statement is just false. Out of all companies out there
in the software world, Microsoft's software has been one of THE BEST for
backwards compatibility. WinXP still runs quite a bit of DOS software
written 2 decades ago. A floppy written on a DOS3.1 machine will be read
perfectly fine on the latest windows machine.

Now, there is no doubt that one of the number one reasons Microsoft is
where it is is because it has so fully embraced backwards compatibility.
It is also without a doubt in my mind that the reason Windows has so
many problems is at least in part due to the backwards compatibility. 

The constant battle is HOW far backwards to aim. You can't aim all the
way back to the CPM/8080 days, but you can't stop being able to run
win95 apps. It's a VERY delicate balance, and I'm sure there are many
man hours used at Microsoft trying to decide what can be dropped.

Frankly, running a 16bit screen saver is a good thing to drop IMHO.

TTYL

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