Oliver Steele

what is it that you are trying to say?

Microsoft’s commitment to backward compatibility was a strong market requirement, especially with large enterprises. Enterprises, and most individuals, won’t upgrade if they have to buy new copies of all their programs,
which can be very expensive.

Note that apple wasn’t successful in the enterprise, while microsoft was. Note also that apple abandoned their legacy OS, switching to an existing, proven code-base that itself was based on an existing successful code-base: unix.

Bill Gates said-back in the day- that when you sell hundreds of millions of copies of the software, the cost of the programming approaches zero.

Apple never had the sales for that, so they had to adopt a more conservative approach to their OS.

Apple’s current success is more the result from Job’s “exile” from apple. It was during this time that he developed the connections and credibility to build iTunes on.

Imagine how successful apple would be if each new iPod was incomputable with the users purchased music.

Programmers always like to justify dumping legacy code and doing a clean rewrite. That doesn’t work in reality, ask netscape about that!

Being backward compatible has earned microsoft billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars of profit.