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IMHO and experience its all about "The Money". Most small to medium size companies don't have the extra cash to replace XP at this point in time.
IMHO and experience its all about "The Money". Most small to medium size companies don't have the extra cash to replace XP at this point in time.
I speak from experience of working for companies that would not upgrade to Windows 7 because of JUST that. Call it asinine, but they were the ones stuck with the incompatible software.
Poor programming is for the in-house software that is developed. These people program the software to require local Administrators group membership of all things.
You speak from limited experience. To base your blanket conclusion on "poor programming" is absurd.
Just because the in-house software you are familiar with was crap doesn't mean everyone's is.
That is like saying an ASP.NET 1.1 is not compatible with a hypothetical IIS 10.0 is due to "poor programming" when it is really due to change in technology.
Why do you imagine Windows 9.x apps don't run or run poorly on 7?
Hint: Microsoft has changed a lot of the code and design models in between.
In the business world, need is equated to money. "Yes, we need to upgrade; but we can make do. We don't have the money to upgrade 25 computers and six of them would have to be replaced to run Win 7." Or variations of this.
The reason many Win9X programs don't run on Win7 x64 is simply that they contain 16-bit code and/or made use of assembler code for perfomance. However, I have a few Win 3.1 programs I wrote that run on Win 7 x32 just fine (I can use Win7 x64, but need XP Mode). By following standard coding practices, they work. They are simple programs written in VB 3, but the point is, I followed the proper API's available at the time, and MS is quite adept at making things pretty backwards compatible. JonM33 is correct in that programs written properly to the API have a very good chance of being compatible.
However, going outside the standard API, or using nifty programming tricks to eek out that last Mhz will often break that backwards compatiblity. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as better performance is good, but it does cause heartache and teeth-nashing later.
PhreePhly
Last edited by PhreePhly; 13 Jul 2010 at 19:14. Reason: spelling
We are still an XP Pro company, with a couple thousand employees. I can tell you, for our company, the main reason is support of lagacy information systems. We use some very antiquated software, I think our gas measurement techs still run some DOS-based stuff actually.
It is not a matter of money for most large companies, truly.
Believe it or not, our IT group is finally rolling out IE8 later this month.
Last edited by s3v3n us3r; 13 Jul 2010 at 19:21. Reason: additional comment
Actually you confirmed my argument.
At the same time, when technology changes some stuff simply doesn't work, despite best practices.
Coding in best practices gets you the longest shelflife of software. BUT when Windows 20 comes around and they say "hey, no support for Windows 7 API" then it must be redone.