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The author might consider using Microsoft products because they are obsessive about providing backwards compatibility. That's one of the positive things about

The author might consider using Microsoft products because they are obsessive about providing backwards compatibility. That's one of the positive things about Microsoft products. The downside is that they have to deal with a lot of old baggage as a result. Apple, on the other hand is almost the opposite. They're obsessive about upgrading everyone and leaving the past behind. That's great because they're free to make bold and innovative changes. The downside of course is that you and your files sometimes get left behind. Both are valid strategies in my opinion and appeal to different customers. If you feel like backwards compatibility is a really important feature then whether you want to admit it or not, you probably would be happy as a Microsoft customer.

Touche 13y ago
Files are data. Data should be eternal. You should be able to convert a presentation you make today 30 years from now to a newer format. Making software not-backwards compatible is fine and normal but if files expire in a few years Apple is saying that the things you do on their computers are disposable.
- 345723 13y ago
  It is eternal, as long as you have the system and the software that it was created with. This can be said for all sorts of things, from the Commodore 64 to Keynote. If you want to be able to access the data on an NES cartridge you are going to need special hardware and software. Yes the ROMS are available now online, but that's only because someone with the hardware and software made it available to others. This is the nature of proprietary formats.
  - pif 13y ago
    > This is the nature of proprietary formats. Indeed. When you choose to save your work in a not-public format, you are decidîng not to care about its lifespan: complaining later is just useless, unfortunately.
- teej 13y ago
  The world isn't so black and white. Document serialization is a rocky landscape that is rife with compromise. You have to balance document open time, document save time, file size, backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, recovery modes, interoperability, size in memory, parsing time, time to save to disk, proprietary embedded file formats, metadata support, and more. And those are just the development considerations. You also have to think about upgrade cycle, time-to-market, third party integrations, and what will help you win marketshare and sell copies. Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice. As the grandparent points out, Microsoft values backwards compatibility. If you value that too, buy Microsoft.
  - Touche 13y ago
    > Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice. I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about information. Information shouldn't have an expiration date. Here's a webpage from 1994: http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?
    - pgeorgi 13y ago
      That was one of the main reasons IE6 survived for so long. So yes, under some circumstances, old formats are deprecated - even on the web. The world is better for it, but it still sucks for those who need that old stuff and are unable to move it forward.
    - banachtarski 13y ago
      That's just not true. Data is software in it's own sense. For example, if you were to compare different binary serialization formats, you would find that you can do better than Google's protocol buffers but only because protobuffs value backwards compatibility. Sure you could write software to migrate formats each step of the way but this is expensive and perhaps the company wanted to focus on the next thing.
- mturmon 13y ago
  "Data should be eternal." This is not a useful statement. If you convert the "should" to a "shall", and try to design a system around that requirement alone, it would prove very hard. Even designing a clock around that requirement is very hard (http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/). If you back off from the "shall", then you are in the standard world of engineering tradeoffs, which is where you started. What features do you want to give up for "eternal"?
  - niels_olson 13y ago
    Perhaps the ideas should be eternal, but the byzantine markup system? This is a major reason why the older I get, the more I prefer plain text wherever I can get it and open standards when I can't. Fancy rendering is just a variation on the drug dealer's bargain "the first hit is always free".
  - wpietri 13y ago
    Designing a clock around that is very hard because the clock is a physical machine that needs to physically last. Software is easier, because it's, well, soft. I'm the developer who build their related Long Bets project (http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/) and I think "data should be eternal" is a perfectly reasonable standard. That was certainly my goal in designing Long Bets. If you start with that as a principle, I don't think it imposes particularly large engineering burdens, especially if you accept some potential degradation as a consequence. For example here, instead of a "fuck you" dialog box, they could have imported the core of a presentation: text and images positioned on a sequence of frames. An analogy is HTML. It's basically zero engineering effort to just suck the text out of a page. It is only modestly more effort to pull out some of the semantic markup, like headings, lists, and emphasis. And that's the part that really hurts to lose, not which precise shade of blue you used in your footer text.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  My approach: Export every presentation as PDF. I'm guessing LibreOffice will be around for a bit (files from 2003 and later working ok) and the PDFs provide a second line of access, but, I accept, they are not convenient for editing.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    Use ODF.
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      I do. LibreOffice saves in that format by default.
- reeses 13y ago
  Assuming arguendo that data = information, a printout will suffice. Your conversion will be manual, but you should not expect a complicated, performant, object serialization format to last through several generations of computer architecture.
- jmcqk6 13y ago
  All of this reminds me of _why http://www.scribd.com/doc/136918361/Collected-PDFs-of-why http://www.scribd.com/doc/136918361/Collected-PDFs-of-why
RyanZAG 13y ago
Not sure I agree entirely here - Microsoft is definitely a far better bet than Apple for this kind of stuff, but it's still not a perfect bet. As Microsoft has shown with their Win8/phone platform, they are trying to transition away from their old platforms (although the market currently won't let them). It's almost a guarantee that eventually old Office versions will fail to run and after that running into data incompatibilities with old files becomes par. With the call-home DRM in post Microsoft platforms, there is also no guarantee you'll even be able to run an old Microsoft version either. A better option is to stick to open standards. If your presentation is done in something like HTML, there is a 100% chance you will be able to view it in even 50 years as it is standardized and there are many implementations available for viewing it. Of course, if your presentation depends on some javascript calculations or a remotely hosted jquery, those probably won't be working in 50 years time either..
- Timmmmbob 13y ago
  Saying Microsoft isn't perfect at backwards compatibility is nit picking to say the least! They are far far ahead of any competition in terms of backwards compatibility. It's practically measured in decades whereas Apple can't manage 5 years.
  - higherpurpose 13y ago
    Silverlight didn't last decades.
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      Did anyone expect it to? Perhaps if it had seen the same interest from developers that other products have, it would have been supported longer...
    - jorgem 13y ago
      I don't think that's the same thing. If Microsoft came out with a newer version of silverlight, you'd expect it to keep reading the old files. The fact they canceled silverlight and won't make a new version, doesn't have much to do with backwards compatibility.
aestra 13y ago
Except compatibility mode is often not compatible. I've run into it a bunch of times where .doc, etc. files just don't render right on new copies of Office. I have had to install old versions of Office to work on certain documents. These documents often have VBA in them. They can't get everything to work properly 100% of the time.
tolmasky 13y ago
The most important point here is that if you are aware of the problem and provide an incredibly lame dialog to deal with it, then you should have just provided the solution. Clearly Apple has all the necessary tools in their possession to fix this problem: they own the source to both Keynote '09 and the latest Keynote. Why not either 1) make a small conversion utility and provide a direct link to it in the dialog (still lazy but at least actionable), or 2) include said utility as part of the latest Keynote so you don't have to show a dialog? We're not talking "backwards compatibility philosophy" here, we're talking user experience 101 (something Apple used to hold in the highest regard). This is particularly important given the context of the software: certain file formats are expected to stick around way longer than others. In particular, with presentation software there are loads of class slides sitting on the internet that probably will never be updated, which means you are often putting the onus on someone who didn't make the file to go and convert it. Compare this to, say, Final Cut where the only real client of the serialized file is probably the original creator, and it is thus more reasonable to expect a higher degree of personal responsibility in keeping it up to date.
- jakejake 13y ago
  This is just the way Apple has always been. Keep up or fall behind. They're not focused on providing backwards compatibility. They leave the door open to losing customers to companies like Microsoft with these kinds of decisions. But that's the choice they made.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    If I were Apple, right now I'd be more concerned with losing customers to Android devices. Case in point: we have an iPad here that is still on the iOS 5 generation it came with. It has been widely reported that iOS 6 was slower (as well as breaking things like Google Maps), iOS 7 was slower still (as well as making various visual styling changes we don't like) and both iOS 6 and iOS 7 have suffered at least one severe security flaw that iOS 5 did not have. In short, there appears to be no rational reason we would "upgrade" this device as we are repeatedly prompted to do. Recently, Apple appears to have changed the rules for app developers so new things going into the app store have to aim primarily at iOS 7. At some point we upgraded an app we'd bought a while ago to get some much-plugged new feature that someone thought was interesting. Aside from the fact that the new feature itself turned out to be paywalled anyway, so the upgrade invitation for the app was basically just spam abusing the app store mechanism, the "upgraded" app also had a horribly glitchy UI where previously it had been smooth as silk drawing exactly the same screens. Can we "downgrade" that app back to something that works, which we already had before, via the app store or otherwise? No, it doesn't seem so. If we "upgraded" iOS itself, as suggested to fix the app (though we've seen no reports that doing so does in fact fix this app), could we then "downgrade" again if we didn't like it? Also no, as far as we can tell. As it happens, we need to have Apple devices around for testing our web stuff, so we're stuck with spending some of our company money on new gear now and then for as long as our customers are doing the same, and we're stuck with using more recent versions of iOS on some devices for the same reason. But at this point, nothing would ever convince me to spend my own money on an iSomething. I was always suspicious of the lock-in and kindergarten UI, and seeing it in action, the results are at least as bad as I expected. What is possibly more interesting is that it seems average users are getting fed up as well. Not so long ago, mobile visits to a site I run that isn't particularly geek-related were utterly dominated by iOS devices. Today, while iOS still represents a clear majority, it is a much closer balance between iOS and Android, and the trend is strongly in the latter's direction. I can't help wondering whether this is people who've now been not-upgraded to more recent versions one time too many, or who've been forced to dump expensive and otherwise working hardware for artificial software reasons, starting to vote with their wallets.
Malarkey73 13y ago
I don't see why innovation of your software means you have to lose compatibility to old data. It seems to me you can do pretty much anything whilst having a small set of conversion scripts to get the old data into your preferred new format. Its not "big data", not streaming data, not rocket science.
dirkgently 13y ago
> Both are valid strategies in my opinion and appeal to different customers Absolutely. One is for customers who don't want to lose any file or data. The other is for those who don't mind losing old stuff, no matter how important it may be. Now that's bold and innovative.

Touche 13y ago

Files are data. Data should be eternal. You should be able to convert a presentation you make today 30 years from now to a newer format. Making software not-backwards compatible is fine and normal but if files expire in a few years Apple is saying that the things you do on their computers are disposable.

345723 13y ago
It is eternal, as long as you have the system and the software that it was created with. This can be said for all sorts of things, from the Commodore 64 to Keynote. If you want to be able to access the data on an NES cartridge you are going to need special hardware and software. Yes the ROMS are available now online, but that's only because someone with the hardware and software made it available to others. This is the nature of proprietary formats.
- pif 13y ago
  > This is the nature of proprietary formats. Indeed. When you choose to save your work in a not-public format, you are decidîng not to care about its lifespan: complaining later is just useless, unfortunately.
teej 13y ago
The world isn't so black and white. Document serialization is a rocky landscape that is rife with compromise. You have to balance document open time, document save time, file size, backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, recovery modes, interoperability, size in memory, parsing time, time to save to disk, proprietary embedded file formats, metadata support, and more. And those are just the development considerations. You also have to think about upgrade cycle, time-to-market, third party integrations, and what will help you win marketshare and sell copies. Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice. As the grandparent points out, Microsoft values backwards compatibility. If you value that too, buy Microsoft.
- Touche 13y ago
  > Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice. I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about information. Information shouldn't have an expiration date. Here's a webpage from 1994: http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?
  - pgeorgi 13y ago
    That was one of the main reasons IE6 survived for so long. So yes, under some circumstances, old formats are deprecated - even on the web. The world is better for it, but it still sucks for those who need that old stuff and are unable to move it forward.
  - banachtarski 13y ago
    That's just not true. Data is software in it's own sense. For example, if you were to compare different binary serialization formats, you would find that you can do better than Google's protocol buffers but only because protobuffs value backwards compatibility. Sure you could write software to migrate formats each step of the way but this is expensive and perhaps the company wanted to focus on the next thing.
mturmon 13y ago
"Data should be eternal." This is not a useful statement. If you convert the "should" to a "shall", and try to design a system around that requirement alone, it would prove very hard. Even designing a clock around that requirement is very hard (http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/). If you back off from the "shall", then you are in the standard world of engineering tradeoffs, which is where you started. What features do you want to give up for "eternal"?
- niels_olson 13y ago
  Perhaps the ideas should be eternal, but the byzantine markup system? This is a major reason why the older I get, the more I prefer plain text wherever I can get it and open standards when I can't. Fancy rendering is just a variation on the drug dealer's bargain "the first hit is always free".
- wpietri 13y ago
  Designing a clock around that is very hard because the clock is a physical machine that needs to physically last. Software is easier, because it's, well, soft. I'm the developer who build their related Long Bets project (http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/) and I think "data should be eternal" is a perfectly reasonable standard. That was certainly my goal in designing Long Bets. If you start with that as a principle, I don't think it imposes particularly large engineering burdens, especially if you accept some potential degradation as a consequence. For example here, instead of a "fuck you" dialog box, they could have imported the core of a presentation: text and images positioned on a sequence of frames. An analogy is HTML. It's basically zero engineering effort to just suck the text out of a page. It is only modestly more effort to pull out some of the semantic markup, like headings, lists, and emphasis. And that's the part that really hurts to lose, not which precise shade of blue you used in your footer text.
keithpeter 13y ago
My approach: Export every presentation as PDF. I'm guessing LibreOffice will be around for a bit (files from 2003 and later working ok) and the PDFs provide a second line of access, but, I accept, they are not convenient for editing.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Use ODF.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    I do. LibreOffice saves in that format by default.
reeses 13y ago
Assuming arguendo that data = information, a printout will suffice. Your conversion will be manual, but you should not expect a complicated, performant, object serialization format to last through several generations of computer architecture.
jmcqk6 13y ago
All of this reminds me of _why http://www.scribd.com/doc/136918361/Collected-PDFs-of-why http://www.scribd.com/doc/136918361/Collected-PDFs-of-why

RyanZAG 13y ago

Not sure I agree entirely here - Microsoft is definitely a far better bet than Apple for this kind of stuff, but it's still not a perfect bet. As Microsoft has shown with their Win8/phone platform, they are trying to transition away from their old platforms (although the market currently won't let them). It's almost a guarantee that eventually old Office versions will fail to run and after that running into data incompatibilities with old files becomes par. With the call-home DRM in post Microsoft platforms, there is also no guarantee you'll even be able to run an old Microsoft version either. A better option is to stick to open standards. If your presentation is done in something like HTML, there is a 100% chance you will be able to view it in even 50 years as it is standardized and there are many implementations available for viewing it. Of course, if your presentation depends on some javascript calculations or a remotely hosted jquery, those probably won't be working in 50 years time either..

Timmmmbob 13y ago
Saying Microsoft isn't perfect at backwards compatibility is nit picking to say the least! They are far far ahead of any competition in terms of backwards compatibility. It's practically measured in decades whereas Apple can't manage 5 years.
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  Silverlight didn't last decades.
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    Did anyone expect it to? Perhaps if it had seen the same interest from developers that other products have, it would have been supported longer...
  - jorgem 13y ago
    I don't think that's the same thing. If Microsoft came out with a newer version of silverlight, you'd expect it to keep reading the old files. The fact they canceled silverlight and won't make a new version, doesn't have much to do with backwards compatibility.

aestra 13y ago

Except compatibility mode is often not compatible. I've run into it a bunch of times where .doc, etc. files just don't render right on new copies of Office. I have had to install old versions of Office to work on certain documents. These documents often have VBA in them. They can't get everything to work properly 100% of the time.

tolmasky 13y ago

The most important point here is that if you are aware of the problem and provide an incredibly lame dialog to deal with it, then you should have just provided the solution. Clearly Apple has all the necessary tools in their possession to fix this problem: they own the source to both Keynote '09 and the latest Keynote. Why not either 1) make a small conversion utility and provide a direct link to it in the dialog (still lazy but at least actionable), or 2) include said utility as part of the latest Keynote so you don't have to show a dialog? We're not talking "backwards compatibility philosophy" here, we're talking user experience 101 (something Apple used to hold in the highest regard). This is particularly important given the context of the software: certain file formats are expected to stick around way longer than others. In particular, with presentation software there are loads of class slides sitting on the internet that probably will never be updated, which means you are often putting the onus on someone who didn't make the file to go and convert it. Compare this to, say, Final Cut where the only real client of the serialized file is probably the original creator, and it is thus more reasonable to expect a higher degree of personal responsibility in keeping it up to date.

jakejake 13y ago
This is just the way Apple has always been. Keep up or fall behind. They're not focused on providing backwards compatibility. They leave the door open to losing customers to companies like Microsoft with these kinds of decisions. But that's the choice they made.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  If I were Apple, right now I'd be more concerned with losing customers to Android devices. Case in point: we have an iPad here that is still on the iOS 5 generation it came with. It has been widely reported that iOS 6 was slower (as well as breaking things like Google Maps), iOS 7 was slower still (as well as making various visual styling changes we don't like) and both iOS 6 and iOS 7 have suffered at least one severe security flaw that iOS 5 did not have. In short, there appears to be no rational reason we would "upgrade" this device as we are repeatedly prompted to do. Recently, Apple appears to have changed the rules for app developers so new things going into the app store have to aim primarily at iOS 7. At some point we upgraded an app we'd bought a while ago to get some much-plugged new feature that someone thought was interesting. Aside from the fact that the new feature itself turned out to be paywalled anyway, so the upgrade invitation for the app was basically just spam abusing the app store mechanism, the "upgraded" app also had a horribly glitchy UI where previously it had been smooth as silk drawing exactly the same screens. Can we "downgrade" that app back to something that works, which we already had before, via the app store or otherwise? No, it doesn't seem so. If we "upgraded" iOS itself, as suggested to fix the app (though we've seen no reports that doing so does in fact fix this app), could we then "downgrade" again if we didn't like it? Also no, as far as we can tell. As it happens, we need to have Apple devices around for testing our web stuff, so we're stuck with spending some of our company money on new gear now and then for as long as our customers are doing the same, and we're stuck with using more recent versions of iOS on some devices for the same reason. But at this point, nothing would ever convince me to spend my own money on an iSomething. I was always suspicious of the lock-in and kindergarten UI, and seeing it in action, the results are at least as bad as I expected. What is possibly more interesting is that it seems average users are getting fed up as well. Not so long ago, mobile visits to a site I run that isn't particularly geek-related were utterly dominated by iOS devices. Today, while iOS still represents a clear majority, it is a much closer balance between iOS and Android, and the trend is strongly in the latter's direction. I can't help wondering whether this is people who've now been not-upgraded to more recent versions one time too many, or who've been forced to dump expensive and otherwise working hardware for artificial software reasons, starting to vote with their wallets.

Malarkey73 13y ago

I don't see why innovation of your software means you have to lose compatibility to old data. It seems to me you can do pretty much anything whilst having a small set of conversion scripts to get the old data into your preferred new format. Its not "big data", not streaming data, not rocket science.

dirkgently 13y ago

> Both are valid strategies in my opinion and appeal to different customers Absolutely. One is for customers who don't want to lose any file or data. The other is for those who don't mind losing old stuff, no matter how important it may be. Now that's bold and innovative.