Re:Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
by grishka on Saturday September 26, 2020 @04:52PM
(#24602026)
So... why upgrade in the first place then, to solve what? Something I learned as a software developer is that if a piece of code is working properly, the best thing you can do is to leave it alone.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Exactly! And that's what both the corporate executives and your parents are thinking!
So Microsoft has always had to work hard to convince people to upgrade. New features were the natural way of doing that. But not maintaining backward compatibility, in a world where almost all software was an one-time purchase, would be a deal breaker. Why upgrade if it's going to cost $20M to make our ERP suite compatible with the new Windows? Why upgrade if all the software I spent $1000 on over the past few years will no longer work? Hence backwards compatibility with existing software was a top priority (to the point that Windows has a lot of fixes to badly coded third-party software built in).