9 ms·

This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility -- their commitment to the investment of labor. If you build your software on Apple,

by chimi 7y ago

This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility -- their commitment to the investment of labor. If you build your software on Apple, there almost certainly will come a point in the future where your code will cease to work. Microsoft has made a commitment to backward compatibility. It's such a huge benefit. I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for decades. I don't have to upgrade my development environment. I don't have to buy a new laptop to run the latest xcode. I never have to worry that my years of investment into my own software platform will be worthless three years from now or require unknown amounts of recoding to work. This is not true of Apple, Ruby, or almost any open source project. I want to continue moving forward all the time. I loathe the requirement to go back and redo what I'd already done and works. It wastes my time, my money, and my confidence in my vendor.

vortico 7y ago
I feel the same. I started a project just four years ago, and now I feel that I'll need to rewrite a huge portion of the graphics code to work with future Mac versions. I also have a lesser fear that in order for my application to work on some future version of Windows, I'll need to deal with code signing and directory access rights nonsense in order for customers to think that the software "works properly". But that's just speculative. Apple's already doing it.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Why should I trust your application to run rampant on my computer? Since when was it a bad thing to isolate what an application can do? Even if you aren’t being purposefully malicious and being sloppy you can still cause damage. Look at what happen with the Google Chrome installer on Macs that had system integrity protection turned off. https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en
  - vortico 7y ago
    It's nonsense because it didn't exist before. Imagine you're a long-time user of my software. You upgrade your operating system (because's Apple's marketing tells you to) and find that my software doesn't work anymore. Who made the change? Apple. Who do customers complain to? Me. Despite any argument, Apple's change has cost me $1000+ of development costs for users to continue using my software. Apple is not my customer, and I don't feel that I owe it a penny. If MacOS didn't exist, it'd only make my life easier. If this change only affected new users, I'd have no complaint.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      So in that case Apple should never introduced tighter security? Well, if you want yo stay in business selling your software, you have to keep it updated. Would you also be upset if you couldn’t still sell 68K software in 2019? You either update your software or people will buy something else. BareBones managed to sell and keep updating BBEdit between Apple transitioning from 68K Macs, PPC Macs, OS X and intel Macs. Did you really think that you would never have to update your software? How long have you been in business?
      - vortico 7y ago
        It's always true that software must have a maintenance budget due to changing user markets. My point is that compared to Windows or Linux, Mac is very expensive to maintain software for. If your software has mostly cross-platform code, I would estimate based on my experience that the Mac-specific work is 10x that of the others. Let's just say thank God that `com.apple.security.cs.disable-library-validation` exists, so the 150 plugin developers for VCV Rack don't have to go through the notarization nonsense that I do. That would truly kill the software, or would force users to disable GateKeeper altogether (with `sudo spctl --master-disable`) to use.
        scarface74 7y ago
        You really think that Microsoft or Adobe spends 10x as much to support the Mac? If the ROI on Macs is so horrible compared to Linux then why wouldn’t Adobe or MS be dropping Mac support and instead support Linux?
- ratww 7y ago
  > I'll need to deal with code signing and directory access rights nonsense It might be nonsense (and a nuisance) for developers, but it's far from that for everyone else. It's about time developers stop assuming they can do whatever they want on everyone else's machines. If it's my computer, developers don't have the right to screw it. Period.
samastur 7y ago
And I have New Yorker's Digital Archive which doesn't except in my VM with an old Windows XP. Nobody is perfect and you can't rely on anyone to solve this problem for you.
scarface74 7y ago
And how much has it cost Microsoft? Apple was able to successfully take the base of MacOS and port it’s operating system to a much lower spec phone back in 2007 and came to dominate the smart phone market (in profit they only thing that matters), the tablet market where MS failed repeatedly, not to mention it was able to port the base OS to everything from Watches and TV set top boxes - all things that Microsoft tried and failed at. MS being so concerned with backwards compatibility has slowed down its ability to move fast into new markets even compared to Google. If you are “building your software” for desktop PCs (or Macs) , you’re building on top of market that is becoming less important every year. There is no energy or investments going into desktop computers besides games and even that market is small. The only companies making real money in computer software are Microsoft and Adobe and even they are pivoting more toward browser based software and mobile. Do you think that Apple should still bundle a PPC emulator with modern Macs? A 68K emulator? Not being willing to drop legacy code comes with its own costs in maintenance and increases the vulnerability surface. Just the fact that there are over a half dozen ways to represent a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities, not to mention all of the other legacy cruft.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Apparently people keep forgetting that laptops and 2-1 hybrids are desktops as well. Microsoft is doing pretty well there, to the point that in many shopping mall shops in Europe, Android tablets have been slowly being replaced by hybrid laptops running Windows 10.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Microsoft Surface sells are estimated to be 20% of Mac sales. https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-microsoft-successfully-reinvented-the-pc/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-mic... Apple sells about 20 million Macs a year and even that pales in comparison to mobile sells. The total sales of computers is estimated to be around 63 million last quarter according to Gartner. Compared to 310 million cell phones (https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-while-huawei-increases-sales-50 https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-...)
semiotagonal 7y ago
I have a 32-bit application I use regularly to interface with old hardware (which isn't on the list incidentally; I suspect there are many other niche applications like this). The hardware vendor isn't going to re-write it. As such I have to... 1) Avoid MacOS upgrades forever, or 2) Let the hardware become nearly impossible to use (there are workarounds on the device itself, but it's really painful to use), or 3) Write a new application myself. If my 6-year old MacBook can last until I find something competitive with Logic Pro on Linux, I won't be buying another Apple machine. There's nothing else I need it for.
- gok 7y ago
  That hardware has software that works on modern Linux kernels?
  - semiotagonal 7y ago
    No, but if it doesn't have software that works on my Mac either, that's one less reason to stay on the Mac. At this point I'm down to one remaining reason to stay on the Mac (Logic Pro) and I'd like to find a feasible alternative.
- octorian 7y ago
  > I have a 32-bit application I use regularly to interface with old hardware And the relevance of this use case is something that "using a laptop in a coffee shop" Apple users seem to be completely and utterly oblivious to. Yet that hardware often has a useful life far longer than the computer plugged into it, or the software that runs on that computer. On top of that, there may not even be a suitable/comparable "modern and supported" replacement for that hardware.
- hrnnnnnn 7y ago
  Have you taken a look at Bitwig Studio? Runs natively on Linux.
  - semiotagonal 7y ago
    Not yet, I'll give it a look.
ellisv 7y ago
> I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for decades. This isn’t always a good thing. I usually don’t like when a piece of software feels like it hasn’t been updated since the 90s. But I guess we don’t want some military defense system to break because it’s 32-bit either.
- gruturo 7y ago
  I could hardly care less how modern a piece of software "feels" as long as it's usable. It doesn't stop being usable 5 years later due to being out of fashion. Many recent redesigns (hello Gmail) are quite the opposite to me btw. I care about fixing security holes, and actually useful improvements (to the UI as well, why not, when they make sense)
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Well, when the software doesn’t support all of the new features of the platform, I definitely care. I hate that even today four years after it was introduced, there are still video apps on iOS that don’t support PIP on the iPad and apps that don’t support split view.
- harshalizee 7y ago
  That is literally my metric for how good a piece of software is. If it can run for a long period of time with minimal to no maintenance that's the hallmark of good engineering. I couldn't care less about how dated it might look as long as gets the job done.
pmiller2 7y ago
Absolutely. Microsoft will even preserve behavior that most people would consider bugs, just to keep old software running. I would say backwards compatibility is a guiding principle of consumer software development at MSFT. Edit: It really says something that the top examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_compatibility are from MSFT platforms.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
> This is not true of ... almost any open source project. I don't think that's generally the case, in part because of the very nature of open source. And certainly, for example, I can easily compile over 30-year-old TeX and run 30-year-old Emacs code.
ken 7y ago
There's plenty of areas where Microsoft has dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. They've got operating systems they no longer support, including Windows 10 Mobile in just a couple months. There's hardware platforms they no longer support. Their "PlaysForSure" content can no longer be played. Their web browsers drop support for old technologies all the time, e.g., Edge doesn't support ActiveX. Xbox One is only backwards compatible with some Xbox 360 games, and Xbox 360 was only backwards compatible with some Xbox games. Really, the only area where Microsoft has bent over backwards for backwards compatibility is Windows-on-x86, because that's been their golden goose for 30 years. A couple weeks ago, their CEO said "The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us". Will they continue to work their butts off in the name of backwards compatibility, or will they start treating it the same way they do their services, media stores, game consoles, and web browsers? I'm not optimistic Microsoft is going to be a better long-term play in this department. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20896908/microsoft-windows-satya-nadella-importance-apps-services-android https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20896908/microsoft-window...
- taspeotis 7y ago
  > Edge doesn't support ActiveX. They maintain Internet Explorer 11 which has support for ActiveX...
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
....for people who choose to sell software it might be. For users this might not matter much at all. I’d rather they remove the bad parts than keep old software working.
thenewnewguy 7y ago
Is this really true? I feel like I keep hearing about how $companyX is still on Windows 95/98/XP/7 and old software is often cited as a reason for not upgrading.
Shivetya 7y ago
Pretty much why the z and i Series have faithful followings, the investment made in some cases decades ago still has value.
Gibbon1 7y ago
Microsoft's problem is potential customers refuse to do business with them because of Bill Gates failure to act in good faith during the desktop era. See also how everything Intel acquires shrivels and dies. Same will happen to Google and Facebook.
johnchristopher 7y ago
> This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility Small friendly jab: My trusty Photoshop CS2 doesn't agree.
simonh 7y ago
> This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play... There’s never going to be one single factor that makes one platform ‘the best’ for everybody. Windows platform improvements has been a dumpster fire for over a decade. Windows 10 seems to have staunched the bleeding by being a proper desktop OS again, and Windows subsystem for Linux looks cool. But their dev story is a hot mess, with a trail of the carcasses of half assed and abandoned dev frameworks behind them. Different users and developers just have different needs and priorities.
mr_toad 7y ago
This has not been my experience. Moving from dos/Windows 3 to 95 broke a lot of software, particularly games. The upgrades to Vista and 7 broke so many programs that they included an XP VM to get old stuff to run.

by chimi 7y ago

vortico 7y ago

I feel the same. I started a project just four years ago, and now I feel that I'll need to rewrite a huge portion of the graphics code to work with future Mac versions. I also have a lesser fear that in order for my application to work on some future version of Windows, I'll need to deal with code signing and directory access rights nonsense in order for customers to think that the software "works properly". But that's just speculative. Apple's already doing it.

scarface74 7y ago
Why should I trust your application to run rampant on my computer? Since when was it a bad thing to isolate what an application can do? Even if you aren’t being purposefully malicious and being sloppy you can still cause damage. Look at what happen with the Google Chrome installer on Macs that had system integrity protection turned off. https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en
- vortico 7y ago
  It's nonsense because it didn't exist before. Imagine you're a long-time user of my software. You upgrade your operating system (because's Apple's marketing tells you to) and find that my software doesn't work anymore. Who made the change? Apple. Who do customers complain to? Me. Despite any argument, Apple's change has cost me $1000+ of development costs for users to continue using my software. Apple is not my customer, and I don't feel that I owe it a penny. If MacOS didn't exist, it'd only make my life easier. If this change only affected new users, I'd have no complaint.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    So in that case Apple should never introduced tighter security? Well, if you want yo stay in business selling your software, you have to keep it updated. Would you also be upset if you couldn’t still sell 68K software in 2019? You either update your software or people will buy something else. BareBones managed to sell and keep updating BBEdit between Apple transitioning from 68K Macs, PPC Macs, OS X and intel Macs. Did you really think that you would never have to update your software? How long have you been in business?
    - vortico 7y ago
      It's always true that software must have a maintenance budget due to changing user markets. My point is that compared to Windows or Linux, Mac is very expensive to maintain software for. If your software has mostly cross-platform code, I would estimate based on my experience that the Mac-specific work is 10x that of the others. Let's just say thank God that `com.apple.security.cs.disable-library-validation` exists, so the 150 plugin developers for VCV Rack don't have to go through the notarization nonsense that I do. That would truly kill the software, or would force users to disable GateKeeper altogether (with `sudo spctl --master-disable`) to use.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        You really think that Microsoft or Adobe spends 10x as much to support the Mac? If the ROI on Macs is so horrible compared to Linux then why wouldn’t Adobe or MS be dropping Mac support and instead support Linux?
ratww 7y ago
> I'll need to deal with code signing and directory access rights nonsense It might be nonsense (and a nuisance) for developers, but it's far from that for everyone else. It's about time developers stop assuming they can do whatever they want on everyone else's machines. If it's my computer, developers don't have the right to screw it. Period.

samastur 7y ago

And I have New Yorker's Digital Archive which doesn't except in my VM with an old Windows XP. Nobody is perfect and you can't rely on anyone to solve this problem for you.

scarface74 7y ago

And how much has it cost Microsoft? Apple was able to successfully take the base of MacOS and port it’s operating system to a much lower spec phone back in 2007 and came to dominate the smart phone market (in profit they only thing that matters), the tablet market where MS failed repeatedly, not to mention it was able to port the base OS to everything from Watches and TV set top boxes - all things that Microsoft tried and failed at. MS being so concerned with backwards compatibility has slowed down its ability to move fast into new markets even compared to Google. If you are “building your software” for desktop PCs (or Macs) , you’re building on top of market that is becoming less important every year. There is no energy or investments going into desktop computers besides games and even that market is small. The only companies making real money in computer software are Microsoft and Adobe and even they are pivoting more toward browser based software and mobile. Do you think that Apple should still bundle a PPC emulator with modern Macs? A 68K emulator? Not being willing to drop legacy code comes with its own costs in maintenance and increases the vulnerability surface. Just the fact that there are over a half dozen ways to represent a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities, not to mention all of the other legacy cruft.

pjmlp 7y ago
Apparently people keep forgetting that laptops and 2-1 hybrids are desktops as well. Microsoft is doing pretty well there, to the point that in many shopping mall shops in Europe, Android tablets have been slowly being replaced by hybrid laptops running Windows 10.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Microsoft Surface sells are estimated to be 20% of Mac sales. https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-microsoft-successfully-reinvented-the-pc/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-mic... Apple sells about 20 million Macs a year and even that pales in comparison to mobile sells. The total sales of computers is estimated to be around 63 million last quarter according to Gartner. Compared to 310 million cell phones (https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-while-huawei-increases-sales-50 https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-...)

semiotagonal 7y ago

I have a 32-bit application I use regularly to interface with old hardware (which isn't on the list incidentally; I suspect there are many other niche applications like this). The hardware vendor isn't going to re-write it. As such I have to... 1) Avoid MacOS upgrades forever, or 2) Let the hardware become nearly impossible to use (there are workarounds on the device itself, but it's really painful to use), or 3) Write a new application myself. If my 6-year old MacBook can last until I find something competitive with Logic Pro on Linux, I won't be buying another Apple machine. There's nothing else I need it for.

gok 7y ago
That hardware has software that works on modern Linux kernels?
- semiotagonal 7y ago
  No, but if it doesn't have software that works on my Mac either, that's one less reason to stay on the Mac. At this point I'm down to one remaining reason to stay on the Mac (Logic Pro) and I'd like to find a feasible alternative.
octorian 7y ago
> I have a 32-bit application I use regularly to interface with old hardware And the relevance of this use case is something that "using a laptop in a coffee shop" Apple users seem to be completely and utterly oblivious to. Yet that hardware often has a useful life far longer than the computer plugged into it, or the software that runs on that computer. On top of that, there may not even be a suitable/comparable "modern and supported" replacement for that hardware.
hrnnnnnn 7y ago
Have you taken a look at Bitwig Studio? Runs natively on Linux.
- semiotagonal 7y ago
  Not yet, I'll give it a look.

ellisv 7y ago

> I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for decades. This isn’t always a good thing. I usually don’t like when a piece of software feels like it hasn’t been updated since the 90s. But I guess we don’t want some military defense system to break because it’s 32-bit either.

gruturo 7y ago
I could hardly care less how modern a piece of software "feels" as long as it's usable. It doesn't stop being usable 5 years later due to being out of fashion. Many recent redesigns (hello Gmail) are quite the opposite to me btw. I care about fixing security holes, and actually useful improvements (to the UI as well, why not, when they make sense)
- scarface74 7y ago
  Well, when the software doesn’t support all of the new features of the platform, I definitely care. I hate that even today four years after it was introduced, there are still video apps on iOS that don’t support PIP on the iPad and apps that don’t support split view.
harshalizee 7y ago
That is literally my metric for how good a piece of software is. If it can run for a long period of time with minimal to no maintenance that's the hallmark of good engineering. I couldn't care less about how dated it might look as long as gets the job done.

pmiller2 7y ago

Absolutely. Microsoft will even preserve behavior that most people would consider bugs, just to keep old software running. I would say backwards compatibility is a guiding principle of consumer software development at MSFT. Edit: It really says something that the top examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_compatibility are from MSFT platforms.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

> This is not true of ... almost any open source project. I don't think that's generally the case, in part because of the very nature of open source. And certainly, for example, I can easily compile over 30-year-old TeX and run 30-year-old Emacs code.

ken 7y ago

There's plenty of areas where Microsoft has dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. They've got operating systems they no longer support, including Windows 10 Mobile in just a couple months. There's hardware platforms they no longer support. Their "PlaysForSure" content can no longer be played. Their web browsers drop support for old technologies all the time, e.g., Edge doesn't support ActiveX. Xbox One is only backwards compatible with some Xbox 360 games, and Xbox 360 was only backwards compatible with some Xbox games. Really, the only area where Microsoft has bent over backwards for backwards compatibility is Windows-on-x86, because that's been their golden goose for 30 years. A couple weeks ago, their CEO said "The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us". Will they continue to work their butts off in the name of backwards compatibility, or will they start treating it the same way they do their services, media stores, game consoles, and web browsers? I'm not optimistic Microsoft is going to be a better long-term play in this department. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20896908/microsoft-windows-satya-nadella-importance-apps-services-android https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20896908/microsoft-window...

taspeotis 7y ago
> Edge doesn't support ActiveX. They maintain Internet Explorer 11 which has support for ActiveX...

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

....for people who choose to sell software it might be. For users this might not matter much at all. I’d rather they remove the bad parts than keep old software working.

thenewnewguy 7y ago

Is this really true? I feel like I keep hearing about how $companyX is still on Windows 95/98/XP/7 and old software is often cited as a reason for not upgrading.

Shivetya 7y ago

Pretty much why the z and i Series have faithful followings, the investment made in some cases decades ago still has value.

Gibbon1 7y ago

Microsoft's problem is potential customers refuse to do business with them because of Bill Gates failure to act in good faith during the desktop era. See also how everything Intel acquires shrivels and dies. Same will happen to Google and Facebook.

johnchristopher 7y ago

> This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility Small friendly jab: My trusty Photoshop CS2 doesn't agree.

simonh 7y ago

> This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play... There’s never going to be one single factor that makes one platform ‘the best’ for everybody. Windows platform improvements has been a dumpster fire for over a decade. Windows 10 seems to have staunched the bleeding by being a proper desktop OS again, and Windows subsystem for Linux looks cool. But their dev story is a hot mess, with a trail of the carcasses of half assed and abandoned dev frameworks behind them. Different users and developers just have different needs and priorities.

mr_toad 7y ago

This has not been my experience. Moving from dos/Windows 3 to 95 broke a lot of software, particularly games. The upgrades to Vista and 7 broke so many programs that they included an XP VM to get old stuff to run.