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Unfortunately, it often seems that with too little money, a service disappears due to bankruptcy, with too much money a service disappears due to talent acquisi
by danieldk 10y ago
Unfortunately, it often seems that with too little money, a service disappears due to bankruptcy, with too much money a service disappears due to talent acquisition.
With software as an application, there was still the possibility to continue using software for years when a company shut down. Windows has terrific backwards compatibility and on UNIX you get far by keeping around old shared libraries and giving a hint to the dynamic loader.
With services, you are lucky to get a one-year heads up. Sometimes the service disappears in mere months. For this reason, I only give my money to services that are too big to fail (e.g. Dropbox & Office 365) or have an easy migration path (Fastmail). Other than that I refuse to buy anything but software where I actually own a copy.
- user5994461 10y ago> Windows has terrific backwards compatibility Windows is most backward compatible software in existence.
- edp 10y agoI think that's what danieldk meant. Terrific != terrible (english is not my primary language so I might be wrong)
- joshyeager 10y agoYou are correct
- TAForObvReasons 10y agoI think user5994461 meant that calling windows backwards compatibility "terrific" doesn't do it justice. My dad wrote software more than 2 decades ago that, amazingly enough, still runs on Windows 10 and he still uses it.
- OskarS 10y agoOut of curiosity, what is that software?
- danieldk 10y agoAnd they had a subsystem for 16-bit OS/2 applications until Windows 2000: https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/4/workstation/reskit/en-us/os2comp.mspx?mfr=true https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions#Windows_NT_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Window...
- ekidd 10y ago> Windows is most backward compatible software in existence. You were downvoted for saying this, but anybody who has read the Old New Thing blog (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) or Raymond Chen's chapter on Windows backwards compatibility (http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch01.pdf http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplech..., PDF) will be both impressed and horrified at the lengths the Windows team went to in order to avoid breaking programs.
- xorcist 10y agoI think that title must be given to OS/360. Usable backwards compatibility for half a century, and counting. Windows backwards compatibility took a dramatic turn for the worse with Windows 7 when they decided to run old software in a VM instead of keeping compatibility. People had to turn to DOSBox instead, which perhaps ironically was originally made for things like Linux to run DOS software.
- nodamage 10y agoThe problem is these days many desktop applications have mobile counterparts and some kind of service to sync the two. If that service shuts down, the application becomes a whole lot less useful. That, and iOS/Android have terrible backwards compatibility, so mobile apps that are not continuously updated often don't work correctly on new OS versions.
- sreenadh 10y agoI believe that the future will be for applications as SaaS or selfhosted on your own server and everyone will have an account with aws or any cloud provided or self hosted cloud. So all the data will be on your own cloud and the data will be stored in a standardized way so that we can switch to another service and data will always be with the user.