5 ms·

Traditionally, this is a significant philosophical difference between Apple and Microsoft that goes quite a ways towards explaining how Microsoft gained and hel

Traditionally, this is a significant philosophical difference between Apple and Microsoft that goes quite a ways towards explaining how Microsoft gained and held dominance for so long in the business sector. Businesses don't want to be told that their working software needs to be updated to make a vendor's bottom-line cheaper. They recognize cost-shifting when they see it and respond by backing towards the exits. Microsoft maintained a philosophy for decades that it was their responsibility to, if at all possible, maintain backwards compatibility with older Windows software as a market differentiator. The primary times I remember them breaking this policy were security related. (That having been said, I got out of active development of Windows software around Windows 8, so this may have changed).

skrtskrt 4y ago
it seems like that on a long enough timeline however, promising that legacy cruft will always keep crufting as it did before seems like a huge burden that leaks into your ability to deliver quality in your current offerings. Sure there are old things that are good and "complete" but far more old stuff is just old and could well be burnt to the ground, except for the fact that you have some customer somewhere relying on its oddities and unintended behaviors as an essential feature of their integrations.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I feel you are arguing for real harm now, versus potential harm in the future. There's no sign that being very-backward-compatible is holding Windows back that I can see. In the other hand I have collected a set of utilities into my work-flow that are easily 20+ years old, and they all work fine. The last major cull from Microsoft was that 16bit programs ceased to work on 64 bit platforms. Other than that I've never had an app fail. Most of those utility supplies have long since disappeared, retired, or died. But I can still keep transferring those apps to the next machine and they keep running. None of this impacts the quality of my current offerings. Ultimately all this costs me is some cheap disk space.
  - greyhair 4y ago
    I have a couple camera apps from the mid 'aughts that were written for Windows XP that still function fine under Windows 10. Same thing with an old photo scanner, that just only recently failed. My last SCSI dependent peripheral. Ran fine on Windows 10, on ancient software, using ancient TWAIN SCSI drivers, until the scanner itself failed. As I moved from XP -> 7 -> 8.1 -> 10, the first thing I did was load up all my old photo software to be sure it would work.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      My father has an ancient scanner from the XP era and the only thing that still works with it is a Windows XP VM he happens to have (I assume later windows could work too, but the XP exists for other reasons and so we continue to connect the scanner to it). Maybe Linux could be beaten to work with it, but this works well enough.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Microsoft struggles to release new OS’s, move to new devices and it’s been trying to move to ARM and has seen little success. Backwards compatibility is very much holding MS back
    - TillE 4y ago
      Windows ARM64 works great, with (similar to macOS) transparent support for x64 programs. Successful or not, I don't see any problem with the software.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Works great as long as you don’t care about the lack of performance, not getting great battery life, and the lack of native applications…
dahfizz 4y ago
Again, I don't think people would have as much of an issue if it was clearly about deprecation. Something like Google's minimum sdk version is annoying, but understandable. It's technical and concrete - you must link against version X because version X-1 is going to disappear. This is not that. It's culling apps that are arbitrarily too old and arbitrarily not popular enough. They must be keeping around old sdk versions if those old but popular apps are allowed to continue on.
worewood 4y ago
> The primary times I remember them breaking this policy were security related. And they also went above and beyond to make it happen too. That time when they byte-patched a binary which they didn't have the source code anymore comes to mind.
- jve 4y ago
  https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-patch-their.html https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-...
  - fisian 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720923
Dalewyn 4y ago
This is the single biggest reason why Microsoft continues to be dominant in the market of practicality. Microsoft will bend backwards 420 degrees and land a headshot to make sure something from 30 years ago will run (within reason) on the latest version of Windows.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  That's the reputation, but it's far from true at the moment. For example, there are numerous games from the 2000s that don't work anymore (I mean crash at startup or soon after, not some soft "not working like before") in any compatibility mode on modern Windows. I'm more familiar with games, but I'm sure the same is true of various other kinds of software (though graphics drivers may well be an important part of the problem, so games may well be over-represented).
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Games depend on more volatile elements like graphics drivers and APIs, like you said, so they aren't exactly representative of Microsoft's backwards compatibility efforts. That said, there are still quite a lot of games which owe their continued operation in modern Windows to Microsoft's veneration of old programs. A better example is productivity software, like Photoshop and Illustrator or Paint Shop Pro. I can get Paint Shop Pro 5, a raster graphics editor from 1998, to run on Windows 11 just fine, for example. Another is Microsoft Office, in which Microsoft goes out of its way to make sure documents created long ago will load and work fine in modern Office, and ancient versions of Office itself will happily run mostly fine on modern Windows too (eg: I run Office XP on my Windows 7 machines).
  - 71bw 4y ago
    Only things I've ever noticed that had issues in modern versions of Windows with is software reliant on old, specialized hardware (for example, dental imaging software) and games. Wouldn't really put the blame in these areas on Microsoft, as they don't provide the drivers nor the custom graphic API's (notice that most old DirectX software has no issues working) - and hell, you can still run your 40-or-so-year-old apps on a 32-bit version of Windows...
needle0 4y ago
Which is the reason that Apple is never going to conquer "traditional" gaming. Traditional games (ones that are NOT perpetually updated live services) and rock-solid-stable development targets have always been very close -- game consoles would always be guaranteed to run any game that's ever been officially released for it, even if it's an unpatched launch-day game running on the final hardware revision of console 8 years after release. Even if Mac hardware manages to vastly outrun the top end gaming PCs on raw performance, they'll never be seen as serious mainstream targets for this reason alone.

skrtskrt 4y ago

it seems like that on a long enough timeline however, promising that legacy cruft will always keep crufting as it did before seems like a huge burden that leaks into your ability to deliver quality in your current offerings. Sure there are old things that are good and "complete" but far more old stuff is just old and could well be burnt to the ground, except for the fact that you have some customer somewhere relying on its oddities and unintended behaviors as an essential feature of their integrations.

bruce511 4y ago
I feel you are arguing for real harm now, versus potential harm in the future. There's no sign that being very-backward-compatible is holding Windows back that I can see. In the other hand I have collected a set of utilities into my work-flow that are easily 20+ years old, and they all work fine. The last major cull from Microsoft was that 16bit programs ceased to work on 64 bit platforms. Other than that I've never had an app fail. Most of those utility supplies have long since disappeared, retired, or died. But I can still keep transferring those apps to the next machine and they keep running. None of this impacts the quality of my current offerings. Ultimately all this costs me is some cheap disk space.
- greyhair 4y ago
  I have a couple camera apps from the mid 'aughts that were written for Windows XP that still function fine under Windows 10. Same thing with an old photo scanner, that just only recently failed. My last SCSI dependent peripheral. Ran fine on Windows 10, on ancient software, using ancient TWAIN SCSI drivers, until the scanner itself failed. As I moved from XP -> 7 -> 8.1 -> 10, the first thing I did was load up all my old photo software to be sure it would work.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    My father has an ancient scanner from the XP era and the only thing that still works with it is a Windows XP VM he happens to have (I assume later windows could work too, but the XP exists for other reasons and so we continue to connect the scanner to it). Maybe Linux could be beaten to work with it, but this works well enough.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Microsoft struggles to release new OS’s, move to new devices and it’s been trying to move to ARM and has seen little success. Backwards compatibility is very much holding MS back
  - TillE 4y ago
    Windows ARM64 works great, with (similar to macOS) transparent support for x64 programs. Successful or not, I don't see any problem with the software.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Works great as long as you don’t care about the lack of performance, not getting great battery life, and the lack of native applications…

dahfizz 4y ago

Again, I don't think people would have as much of an issue if it was clearly about deprecation. Something like Google's minimum sdk version is annoying, but understandable. It's technical and concrete - you must link against version X because version X-1 is going to disappear. This is not that. It's culling apps that are arbitrarily too old and arbitrarily not popular enough. They must be keeping around old sdk versions if those old but popular apps are allowed to continue on.

worewood 4y ago

> The primary times I remember them breaking this policy were security related. And they also went above and beyond to make it happen too. That time when they byte-patched a binary which they didn't have the source code anymore comes to mind.

jve 4y ago
https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-patch-their.html https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-...
- fisian 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720923

Dalewyn 4y ago

This is the single biggest reason why Microsoft continues to be dominant in the market of practicality. Microsoft will bend backwards 420 degrees and land a headshot to make sure something from 30 years ago will run (within reason) on the latest version of Windows.

tsimionescu 4y ago
That's the reputation, but it's far from true at the moment. For example, there are numerous games from the 2000s that don't work anymore (I mean crash at startup or soon after, not some soft "not working like before") in any compatibility mode on modern Windows. I'm more familiar with games, but I'm sure the same is true of various other kinds of software (though graphics drivers may well be an important part of the problem, so games may well be over-represented).
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Games depend on more volatile elements like graphics drivers and APIs, like you said, so they aren't exactly representative of Microsoft's backwards compatibility efforts. That said, there are still quite a lot of games which owe their continued operation in modern Windows to Microsoft's veneration of old programs. A better example is productivity software, like Photoshop and Illustrator or Paint Shop Pro. I can get Paint Shop Pro 5, a raster graphics editor from 1998, to run on Windows 11 just fine, for example. Another is Microsoft Office, in which Microsoft goes out of its way to make sure documents created long ago will load and work fine in modern Office, and ancient versions of Office itself will happily run mostly fine on modern Windows too (eg: I run Office XP on my Windows 7 machines).
- 71bw 4y ago
  Only things I've ever noticed that had issues in modern versions of Windows with is software reliant on old, specialized hardware (for example, dental imaging software) and games. Wouldn't really put the blame in these areas on Microsoft, as they don't provide the drivers nor the custom graphic API's (notice that most old DirectX software has no issues working) - and hell, you can still run your 40-or-so-year-old apps on a 32-bit version of Windows...

needle0 4y ago

Which is the reason that Apple is never going to conquer "traditional" gaming. Traditional games (ones that are NOT perpetually updated live services) and rock-solid-stable development targets have always been very close -- game consoles would always be guaranteed to run any game that's ever been officially released for it, even if it's an unpatched launch-day game running on the final hardware revision of console 8 years after release. Even if Mac hardware manages to vastly outrun the top end gaming PCs on raw performance, they'll never be seen as serious mainstream targets for this reason alone.