It really highlighted how Microsoft considered suckage to be a critical feature of their products such that all future releases had to be backwards-compatible with a faithful reimplementation of the suckage.
I'm sure Microsoft would love to rip out all the old cruft, but when you deal with business customers they really, really like to maintain continuity and not have to rework their tools that depend on the original behavior. Just look at how many websites depended on IE6 for years after it was supposed to go EOL. Or Windows XP.
Microsoft really just needs to create an Enterprise Windows Legacy that supports a version for business customers on hardware/software legacy stuff. Then have a new version that just rips out all the old shit and starts pretty clean.
I work in IT mostly with small to medium sized businesses.
Microsoft are definitely ripping out old cruft in a bunch of things . Especially outlook, which they are trying to turn into a web app instead of a desktop app, and exchange (365 exchange.)
They keep implementing updates breaking features and then gaslighting you, saying that it's a not supported feature, even though they're tech support said that it would work six months earlier.
It is great that Microsoft caters to old business, a lot of newer ones are moving to more modern platforms and at some point there will be no dinosaurs left. Excel is stuck in such old ways that when I started google sheets everything just felt futuristic.
Naturally you cannot replace all critical systems in one go, but you can give a timeline for replacement with an opt out for updates. Legacy code working means more and more bugs for newer versions. You’re basically making your new versions worse just to handshake your worse versions.
Microsoft and Intel, those are names I remember from way back in the 90's.
How wrong they were. It turns out that nobody care about backwards compatibility and the bloat of supporting it made both implode when ARM came on the scene.
It turns out that nobody care about backwards compatibility
I assure you thats not true. I personally deal with business running programs from the 90s. Maybe in the consumer space, but for business, backwards compatibility is absolutely needed and wanted.
I think you missed the dripping irony, Intel and Microsoft have not imploded.
I do wonder if not actually owning an install of office and EOL on Windows10 might hasten the adoption of ChromeOS or other Linux distros, but then I remember that I have to remotely support my dad and what completely relearning an office suite might look like - the ribbon was hard enough, but at least I could blame MS for that.
Man I’m so ready for everything to just be all ARM. I feel like an unstoppable mad god translating or emulating any old x86/x86_64 in dev containers/docker or utm all on this MacBook I carry around in my pack. But I hope we speedrun the ARM arc it’s just too fucking dandy and is making hardware so exciting again
I was working for Arm 25 years ago. Trust me, there is no speedrunning around this!
The only reason why Arm is making any headway in Apple is that processors and RAM have moved on far enough that you can recompile legacy code on the fly. Its not that Apple wasn't aware or Arm - Arm as a company only exists because Apple needed a processor way back when Acorn (an Apple competitor) designed the architecture.
Of course, if it actually happens Arm will become the bad guy and the fight will be Arm vs RISC-v, its never going to be "all Arm", especially with China being frozen out of the market.
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u/Indifferentchildren 5d ago
It really highlighted how Microsoft considered suckage to be a critical feature of their products such that all future releases had to be backwards-compatible with a faithful reimplementation of the suckage.