Quote:
Originally Posted by Radio
It's not a failure, it is by design. It costs money to support old products, and I understand withdrawing support. But if you write keys into your code so that new apps will not even load on older OS, even though they would likely run, then the customer is required to upgrade their systems.
|
Some truth in that, but some misconception also. All that would be necessary is to assure backward compatibility in the OS's driver interfaces. Then it would never be necessary for anyone to provide new drivers for use in new operating systems. This is actually rather easy to do, and Microsoft could have done it from the beginning, as IBM did on mainframes. Had they done it, any device that ever worked in some old Windows would still work in any new Windows, using the same old drivers. Unfortunately, Windows was designed by dilettantes, not by pros.
That wouldn't mean that the driver interfaces in Windows couldn't be enhanced. New features could still be added from time to time in the OS's driver interfaces -- but old drivers that hadn't ever needed those new features would still work the same way they always had.