6 ms·

> on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility Ah, those users. Users who want their OS to stay firmly in the

> on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility Ah, those users. Users who want their OS to stay firmly in the background and let them get on with their jobs, and who aren't actually that bothered about "feature" upgrades every month or three. Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product.

mschuster91 4y ago
> Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product. The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand: - any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time, and there's a lot of these) get pissed because on top of having to pay Microsoft for new software (to avoid not getting updates for EOL software), they have to spend significant sums re-training employees, testing upgrade paths, rework internal tooling... - if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars (the market for hardware sporting actual parallel ports or ISA slots is insane, because so much early 90s hardware runs on that) - at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden. Linux userland generally doesn't care a bit about backwards compatibility, and Apple announces BC breaks early enough / keeps support long enough that users can upgrade over time - aided by the fact that most hardware that people attach to Macs doesn't cost more than ten to fifty grands (=very expensive audio / video stuff) and has to be upgraded anyway to keep up with new features. That in turn puts pressure on Microsoft to keep up with innovation. - on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward - mostly, no transistor space wasted with long-superseded crap dating back to the 1980s and way better power management - while Microsoft is more or less at the whims of Intel's mismanagement and the utter crap that third-party ARM SoC vendors throw onto the market and dare call a CPU.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  > if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars The obvious solution is to leave those enterprise customers behind on the legacy edition of Windows and launching something new. But Microsoft seems incapable of going to market with something new also. They created Windows 10x, and then went and merged the new parts back into the legacy platform.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    It's strange that MS has never did what Apple did with the OS 9 → OS X transition, starting with a fresh foundation and making a clean break from the predecessor by way of a well-integrated "Classic" mode that seamlessly runs legacy applications in a "borderless" VM. The most natural time to have done this would've probably been going from XP → Vista/7, which broke a number of old things anyway. For all that switching mainline Windows over to the NT kernel in 2k/XP improved Windows, the benefit wasn't as great as it could've been if they'd been able to unshackle the OS from backwards compatibility with all the preceding Windows/DOS stuff.
    - wolpoli 4y ago
      Windows 10x was rumored to run Win32 programs within a single-combined container for backward compatibility purpose too.
    - creatonez 4y ago
      Keep in mind that Apple didn't have much to lose, in the years leading up to OS X they were scrambling for market share lost to Windows 95, and already in a frenzy over a failed modernization attempt (Copland) that was intending to maintain backwards compatibility. They were truly desperate, on the verge of going bankrupt under a "corporate rehabilitator" CEO with no Steve Jobs in sight. Microsoft had a good thing going, with the massive success of MS-DOS and Windows 95 it was imperative that the next generation consumer OS, Windows 2000, could run programs from their existing well-respected platform without users noticing the gap. (With OS X, you noticed the gap -- totally different UI style when in Classic Environment, and the Carbon API for easy porting was a mess that went unadopted by developers)
cubefox 4y ago
The problem with pleasing old costumers is that you might fail to gain new customers. Microsoft is mostly conservative with its OS, while Apple is not afraid to cut off features it consideres outdated. And the MacOS market share has increased strongly over the last ~20 years.
- simula67 4y ago
  You can solve this problem with branding. Have a "Windows OS Bleeding Edge" brand that changes regularly. Have "Windows OS LTS" brand that changes less often.
  - notarget137 4y ago
    They have tried exactly that with Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly.
    - pdntspa 4y ago
      It was gimped from the start, LTSB/LTSC was never available to the general public
    - gruez 4y ago
      >And killed it off quite qucikly. Evidently not, considering there were 4 such releases. The earliest was on July 29, 2015, and the latest was on November 16, 2021 and will be supported until January 13, 2032.
    - creatonez 4y ago
      It hasn't been killed off. Microsoft has confirmed publicly that Windows 11 will have an LTSC release. Curious what they will do about Microsoft Store apps in such a release. It's becoming more of a pressing concern. Maybe Windows 11 LTSC will have a "filtered flathub" situation similar to Red Hat / Fedora?
    - logifail 4y ago
      > [..] Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly They really didn't. Full disclosure: I installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 on a brand new laptop earlier today :) For this specific device, my wish is a Windows-compatible OS that's going to shut up and stay out of the way, and it seems the LTSC variant of Win10 is the closest Microsoft are willing to provide at the moment. That LTSC doesn't come with Edge, Cortana or the Windows Store, well that's just the icing on the cake.

mschuster91 4y ago

> Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product. The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand: - any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time, and there's a lot of these) get pissed because on top of having to pay Microsoft for new software (to avoid not getting updates for EOL software), they have to spend significant sums re-training employees, testing upgrade paths, rework internal tooling... - if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars (the market for hardware sporting actual parallel ports or ISA slots is insane, because so much early 90s hardware runs on that) - at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden. Linux userland generally doesn't care a bit about backwards compatibility, and Apple announces BC breaks early enough / keeps support long enough that users can upgrade over time - aided by the fact that most hardware that people attach to Macs doesn't cost more than ten to fifty grands (=very expensive audio / video stuff) and has to be upgraded anyway to keep up with new features. That in turn puts pressure on Microsoft to keep up with innovation. - on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward - mostly, no transistor space wasted with long-superseded crap dating back to the 1980s and way better power management - while Microsoft is more or less at the whims of Intel's mismanagement and the utter crap that third-party ARM SoC vendors throw onto the market and dare call a CPU.

wolpoli 4y ago
> if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars The obvious solution is to leave those enterprise customers behind on the legacy edition of Windows and launching something new. But Microsoft seems incapable of going to market with something new also. They created Windows 10x, and then went and merged the new parts back into the legacy platform.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  It's strange that MS has never did what Apple did with the OS 9 → OS X transition, starting with a fresh foundation and making a clean break from the predecessor by way of a well-integrated "Classic" mode that seamlessly runs legacy applications in a "borderless" VM. The most natural time to have done this would've probably been going from XP → Vista/7, which broke a number of old things anyway. For all that switching mainline Windows over to the NT kernel in 2k/XP improved Windows, the benefit wasn't as great as it could've been if they'd been able to unshackle the OS from backwards compatibility with all the preceding Windows/DOS stuff.
  - wolpoli 4y ago
    Windows 10x was rumored to run Win32 programs within a single-combined container for backward compatibility purpose too.
  - creatonez 4y ago
    Keep in mind that Apple didn't have much to lose, in the years leading up to OS X they were scrambling for market share lost to Windows 95, and already in a frenzy over a failed modernization attempt (Copland) that was intending to maintain backwards compatibility. They were truly desperate, on the verge of going bankrupt under a "corporate rehabilitator" CEO with no Steve Jobs in sight. Microsoft had a good thing going, with the massive success of MS-DOS and Windows 95 it was imperative that the next generation consumer OS, Windows 2000, could run programs from their existing well-respected platform without users noticing the gap. (With OS X, you noticed the gap -- totally different UI style when in Classic Environment, and the Carbon API for easy porting was a mess that went unadopted by developers)

cubefox 4y ago

The problem with pleasing old costumers is that you might fail to gain new customers. Microsoft is mostly conservative with its OS, while Apple is not afraid to cut off features it consideres outdated. And the MacOS market share has increased strongly over the last ~20 years.

simula67 4y ago
You can solve this problem with branding. Have a "Windows OS Bleeding Edge" brand that changes regularly. Have "Windows OS LTS" brand that changes less often.
- notarget137 4y ago
  They have tried exactly that with Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly.
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    It was gimped from the start, LTSB/LTSC was never available to the general public
  - gruez 4y ago
    >And killed it off quite qucikly. Evidently not, considering there were 4 such releases. The earliest was on July 29, 2015, and the latest was on November 16, 2021 and will be supported until January 13, 2032.
  - creatonez 4y ago
    It hasn't been killed off. Microsoft has confirmed publicly that Windows 11 will have an LTSC release. Curious what they will do about Microsoft Store apps in such a release. It's becoming more of a pressing concern. Maybe Windows 11 LTSC will have a "filtered flathub" situation similar to Red Hat / Fedora?
  - logifail 4y ago
    > [..] Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly They really didn't. Full disclosure: I installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 on a brand new laptop earlier today :) For this specific device, my wish is a Windows-compatible OS that's going to shut up and stay out of the way, and it seems the LTSC variant of Win10 is the closest Microsoft are willing to provide at the moment. That LTSC doesn't come with Edge, Cortana or the Windows Store, well that's just the icing on the cake.