Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a Windows and Mac developer, and I'll tell you why Apple isn't worse: their users don't hold on to old versions.

With free or 30 dollar major OS upgrades, upgrades that are consistently better than their predecessors (or at the very least (Lion?) not noticeably worse!), great and constant innovation to make the upgrades compelling and appealing, smooth/streamlined and automated "SP" deployments over the net, and many other things that I won't bother listing, they ensure that their users are, by and large, using the latest version of their OS.

They can break compatibility every time, for all I care. But when Windows 7 (or for all we know, Windows 8 too) provides no real enhancements over XP (at the very least, in the eyes of a consumer) except bloat and a confused interface, then and only then do I complain about how "evil" they are for (possibly purposely, if you look into the details of the hack I posted in another comment, you'll see why) breaking support for older operating systems.

That's a complete fallacy in my experience developing high-end VFX software for three platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X).

OS X is causing us so much trouble compared to other platforms. With XCode developer stuff, you can only target two versions of OS X, so that's 10.5&10.6, 10.6&10.7 and soon to be 10.7&10.8.

Some of our customers want Lion support. But a lot still want 10.5 support and most of them still want 10.6 support. There's no way of us providing this short of completely separate builds for OS X targeting different versions of the SDK.

And the "consistently better" part is a joke for certain things, e.g. OS X OpenGL support seems to be getting worse despite supporting a later version (3.2) to some degree.

Maybe things are better for more "consumer orientated" developers, but definitely for high-end stuff, it's getting to the point where it's getting more trouble than it's worth to develop for OS X.

Once Steve Jobs compared PCs to trucks and tablets to cars. It seems that Apple doesn't care about the "truck" market. They left server market for Linux and professional desktop PCs for Microsoft.

I guess Apple cannot tell this directly but probably you should stop develop highly specialized software for OS X.

But if you don't want to upgrade you are out of luck on Apple. this was at least true the last time I had a mac. It was a G5 iMac with OS X 10.3. If you didn't upgrade hardly any hardware worked correctly , but everything after OS X 10.4 just didn't really work on this. I was pretty dissapointed and left the Mac world after this experience.

"They can break compatibility every time, for all I care."

that's why apple won't find much traction in the business world. backwards compatibility is very important. You want to write software once, not have to continually update to migrate it to the latest OS

Does it matter? They make plenty of money anyway and the company stock is doing better than those who attempt to go for the enterprise market.

Sometimes it seems that the business world assumes that everything revolves around it.

And if we return our attention to VS 11, the main topic here, and MSFT who produces it, they already hold enterprise market, and now they want to ignore it because they expect to be better Apple than Apple? I suspect they are making themselves less relevant by such moves, actively stimulating enterprises to consider alternatives. How about making a successful consumer product instead of trying to make the established Windows to be everything for everybody including enterprises, making Windows more "consumery and breakable"? I am talking about "Professional" and "Server" products now, not about "home" ones.

Maybe they should rebrand VS 11 to "VS 11 Home."

Yes it's quite funny. Just like people debate Apache vs. Nginx back and forth here while Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank taking almost all the profits from the web server market with IIS.

Terrible comparison, IMO. Microsoft doesn't sell IIS standalone, it comes bundled with their server licenses.

The Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server licenses are what make the money. IIS is just included in all of them.

If they tried to charge money for IIS and shipped it for any other OS, it would fail pretty quick as it's not very sys admin friendly and most of it's performance is heavily dependent on Windows threading model.

"profits from the web server market"... WHAT profits? Apache & Nginx are both... wait for it... FREE! So is the underlying OS. And who's number 1 and 2 in the market? Oh yeah, Apache and Nginx...

> that's why apple won't find much traction in the business world. backwards compatibility is very important.

By all appearances they don't care to be in that market, and for that very reason. So, the system works.

their users don't hold on to old versions.

Tell that to my G5 Mac Pro. :(

I'm sure there is an amount of 10.5 users... (Looking at my old PB12.).

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