Vista: And So It Begins

[LostMyMind]

Which is why Macs always had a small share of the market. Because they almost never had backwards compatibility and wasn't very friendly for developing on.

Microsoft is breaking what made their OS "safe" to upgrade to. Backwards compatibility and developer friendliness.

[Dips]

But to break programs that works fine in a single OS step backwards.

Just like Apple. We used to have a Mac version of our software, but Apple kept coming up with new versions which wouldn't run it. O/S X was the last straw. There weren't enough sales to justify the cost of playing "keep-up with the Mac" so we stopped developing for it in 2001.

The best part was when Apple sent a rep to our company to try and convince us to continue development. They promised us everything but what we really needed: money to hire another programmer. The guy couldn't get his mind around the fact that we weren't about to take our people off profitable projects just to help Apple sell more Macs.

Nobody's happy with the status quo, but what can we do?

[Depot Denizen]

It depends. Some software absolutely will not run in Windows Vista, even if it was perfect in XP. My uni's Symantec and Cisco VPN software is a great example of this. Even some other programs won't function (sometimes fully, sometimes not at all) in Vista. We've essentially been telling departments not to purchase Vista machines (as our tech services department is still working on supporting it), and we won't be offering the MCA for Vista or Office '07 until May or June. Which, actually coincides with our hopeful move to the new student center.

As far as the student machines go...our folks will be hard at work making sure our uni software packages work on Vista, as it's likely our Dells and Gateways will be shipping with Vista come Back To School. I'm not looking forward to it, and neither is the rest of my department. I'm one of the more knowledgeble people on our student consulting team (we man the dungeon Helpline doing phone tech support - I work two jobs at my uni), so I've been working with Vista when I can.

Ironically our supervisors have all but ordered us to play with Vista and Office '07 on our machines. We'll be forced to support the damn thing once the school year starts up, for better or worse.

[Gurndigarn]

But to break programs that works fine in a single OS step backwards. You might as well not call it Windows and say it's a brand new OS.

Bloody hell, did they actually do that? Win2000/XP/etc stuff doesn't work on it? And here I thought it was too bad that macs weren't going to be able to support pre-OSX stuff on the intel-based macs.

[Kilamon]

I still believe that Windows has a lot of catching up to do to get to the point where OS/2 was with Warp. It's too bad IBM never aggressively pursued a release with that. I beta tested and it was awesome (for the time). The voice control was excellent, it never needed a defrag, and the customizability was truly awesome.

Having said that, I should point out that Vista is not going to be on my system for another 2 years. By that time, some of the bugs and exploits should be fixed.

[Acolyte]

I can see Vista being great...when they release SP2 and take care of all the compatability and security issues. Until then, I dread having to service it.

[LostMyMind]

Vista is going to die a quick painful death. It's got soo many problems. You can fix the problems by turning off the new "security" feature. But when you do, it's *gasp* just like XP.

I have no plans to get Vista. Not unless they put in serious backwards compatibility. Dropping 3 or 4 generations compatibility is fine, nobody grumbles when XP drop win3.0 and DOS compatibility. (yes, I know you can fake it) But when quite a bit of early Win95 programs wasn't working with XP, there was quite a bit of grumbles. But we accepted it, since it was 3 generations ago.

But to break programs that works fine in a single OS step backwards. You might as well not call it Windows and say it's a brand new OS.

[technical.angel]

The new Sports information person sent over their old laptop which was, well, old. It had been stepped on, and the harddrive was on it's way to failing. They want us to fix it. We managed NOT to laugh in their face.

The last person in the position had decided to get a new desktop rather than replacing the laptop, as we now only supply you ONE computer, desktop or laptop, not both.

The SI person, meanwhile went out to buy himself a laptop (out of his pocket), and wanted us to put our corp. license of Photoshop on it, and see why he couldn't update our website.

After calling down the webmaster, we determined that the plugin that's used to edit the website, being old and not really supported anymore, isn't Vista compatible. So we tell him to have his boss buy him a laptop to replace the one that died, and we'll put our copy of XP on it.

They go out and buy a Toshiba. All the drivers were compatible with Vista only. I thought the head of Athletics was going to kill us when we told him to get another one. They bought a Sony Vaio, it worked, the peasant rejoiced.

I'm not looking forward to the students gettin' Vista either...

[Dips]

We just posted our the first Vista-compatible version of our software last week.

What that means is that earlier versions won't run on Vista. Folks who bought new software or updates in the last couple of years won't need to pay for this version; it's free. Folks who bought earlier than that will pay either 1/3 or 1/2 price (compared to the price of a new license) to update to it.

They also have the choice (for now) of not using Vista and, thus, not having to worry about updating our software.

We still expected to hear cries of anguish about this and we weren't disappointed.

We got our first one yesterday. It was quite civil. They had spent thousands on a new computer which had Vista, spent hundreds on the latest version of Office, called all their other AT providers and updated those, then they called us to see how to install 1999 software on Vista. They actually accepted the bad news with good grace and a minimum of grumbling as they bought the update.

I know it won't always go that well. We have more than a few entitlement-minded customers who think that spending thousands of dollars with other vendors is going to entitle them to special treatment from us. I know this because it's happened (see "The Year-Old-Software Returner" for a very extreme example). They also think that spending money once ten years ago entitles them to free stuff now because they are "very old customers." I wish I were kidding, but that one happens all the time.

I'm bracing myself. The next few years are going to be fun.