Re: The flight of the upgrade path

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From: Yoz Grahame
Subject: Re: The flight of the upgrade path
Date: 14:43 on 09 Oct 2003
On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 08:17:07AM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote:
> > Yet within three months of Jaguar coming out, every second
> > bit of new OS X software I saw *demanded* it. I probably have a
> > distinctly inaccurate impression of things here, but... (trails off
> > waving hands, hoping for a Mac user to continue at this point)
> 
> Microsoft doesn't need to use the OS that way, they have Office.

Even so, Office 2003 supports a four-year-old OS version (though not, 
tellingly, WinME), and I'm imagining that Office XP (which supports 
Win98) is still going to be available and supported for a little while. 

But I take your point, since if any app can push Windows upgrades it's
going to be Office. I was going to say that a four-year upgrade margin
is an understandable limit: if you haven't upgraded your OS in five or
more years, the chances are that you're not going to be a potential
customer for the latest Office anyway. That was until I remembered the 
hordes of massive enterprise desktop flotillas that are still running 
NT4.

> But... yeh, I wish Apple would implement service packs to at least
> upgrade the frameworks (shared libraries on amphetamines) so they
> were API-compatible. On the other hand I'm glad they've avoided the
> temptation to do what Microsoft has been doing to keep compatible
> and having software vendors ship upgraded DLLs with their products.

Is that really so bad, though? Especially since recent Windows versions 
have DLL version management.

(Apologies, this thread is already distressingly hate-free. I should 
do the rant I've been saving up about Windows Networking. I've got some 
serious bile there.)

-- Yoz

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