Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Microsoft is a company that is about saying yes, to everyone. Apple is one of the few companies which says no on various subjects to reduce the problem space. Eg apple strategically obsoletes stuff like Carbon. I think this has a dramatic effect on the companies involved. Microsofts feature + backward compatibility matrix is so huge (theyre supporting applications that were written for Windows 3.1) that theyre stuck solving an unsolvable problem. Actually interesting anecdote - Simcity depended on a bug in windows 3.x for correct operation, the bug in question was fixed in windows 95. However in testing Microsoft found that simcity breaks and added code as a special case to emulate the bug if simcity is run. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html).I am not favoring either approach, just saying that there is a big difference. Those that favor backwards compatibility have their adherents (big businesses etc) and those that stay nimble because of periodically cutting dead wood have their own followers (early adopters, technophiles).

> apple strategically obsoletes stuff like Carbon.

Way I hear things, Apple hasn't completely gotten rid of Carbon yet. iTunes is still around, in all it's terrible glory.

Yeah, 32-bit Carbon is still around, but they axed a 64-bit version that was (mostly?) complete.

And newer APIs (and even obj-c language features) are only available to 64-bit processes, so sticking with 32-bit so you can use Carbon will be less of an option over time.

From what I've heard, iTunes is super crufty and has it's own dedicated team, separate from the apps team. There's a lot of baggage to carry with iTunes, especially with legacy support. (I can stil sync my 1st generation 5GB iPod over Firewire.)

When your OS is installed on a billion or so computers worldwide backwards-compatability is pretty important. Vista broke backwards compatability for the driver model (for excellent reasons BTW) and MS got reamed for it. It's easy to be laisse faire about backwards compatability until it is your app or your machine that is being broken.

The thing is… if there are thousands of Flash apps on users' iPads, and an OS update breaks Flash, how long will it take Adobe to fix it? Or is Apple supposed to either hold up the OS or code around bugs in Flash (or other layer)?

If Apple breaks Flash because they changed their APIs in an incompatible way they would also have broken apps that used the same APIs directly. How about if Apple just stays away from breaking changes as much as possible and, if they are occasioanlly needed, communicates them well in advance so that no one gets broken?

There is some truth to that, but there are options besides maintaining backwards compatibility to a huge extent in your products. As long as you boldly and loudly proclaim how it is being broken, there is nothing wrong with saying if you can't accept that don't upgrade. Or more recently, telling people to run that particular program in a virtual environment.

I primarily use windows, but I have a virtual machine with Linux specifically to run Sage. I know its not the same, but it is a very similar concept.

Apple's agility is owed to its smaller installed base and more technical end-users. It is notoriously difficult to obsolete something upon which many users are dependent. A large part of Windows sales comes from the ability to run old, often proprietary or unmaintained, software. People would be mad if things stopped working and they'd investigate other techniques -- as Windows's featureset is much smaller than its competitors', drawing attention to alternatives like OS X or Ubuntu is the last thing Microsoft wants to do.

tl;dr backward compatibility keeps customers, no backward compatibility makes them flee, for Windows.

"[...] and more technical end-users."

What Apple products are we talking about here? Are you implying that people who own mass market consumer electronic devices like iPod and iPhone are more technically inclined? I think that is an inaccurate statement: it is nearly impossible to hold the kind of market share in that space and somehow do it with only (or even mostly) "technical" users... there just aren't enough of them. Not to mention that it flies in the face of Apple's "it just works" marketing mantra.

In the world of PCs, you might have an argument. But I would say, once again, that your assumption goes against everything Apple marketing has been saying for 10 years. If the marketing has been working, then they've been attracting non-technical users into their user-base for years.

"[...] as Windows's featureset is much smaller than its competitors' [...]"

In what way?

> I disagree. Microsoft is a company that is about saying yes, to everyone. Apple is one of the few companies which says no on various subjects to reduce the problem space.

The problem is that Microsoft used to say no as well. The larger the (software) company is the less humble and wise it becomes as its realizations are stretched across multiple divisions.

Perhaps I'm misreading you, but "humble" isn't the first word that springs to mind when I think about Apple.

Don't fool yourself. Both companies are there to do nothing else but make a profit (not saying that in itself is a bad thing) but do it in a different way.

The only way to be free of artificial restrictions is to use OSS.

Don't fool yourself. All three, Microsoft, Apple, OSS, are there to do nothing else but survive in a Darwinian sense.

The only way to be free of artificial restrictions is to be technology agnostic, to not subscribe to any one camp for religious reasons, and to simply use the right tool for the job.

Goddammit ... somehow I couldn't express in words what you just said in only 2 phrases.

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