>I gave my opinion. Only time will tell if I'm right or wrong.
I don't have a crystal ball, either, but I will wager US$ 100.00 on 32 bit compatibility still being present in the latest MS workstation OS 10 years from now. So, let's revisit this on July 11, 2017, and make the necessary banking transactions, shall we <bg>?
Cheers!
Pertti
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>>I imagine that's correct, but I would be willing to bet good money on 32 bit compatibility being around for a long, long time. As has been pointed out already, 16 bit compatibility is still present in Vista, which is 8 generations beyond Windows 3.1, the first "16 bit only" MS OS (let's see, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT, ME (ugh!), XP, Vista) and 4 generations -- give or take -- beyond "32 bit only" MS OS. I remember when XP was introduced, Bill Gates himself declared very publicly that DOS is dead. Nobody seemed to take him seriously for the obvious reason that MS simply couldn't do that, it wouldn't make any business sense for them. Because...
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>>There simply is too much legacy stuff built on previous Windows and even DOS versions out there. MS simply couldn't afford cutting off 32 bit app compatibility for good, they may actually NEVER be able to do that (witness DOS apps still running in Vista Command Window). If they did that, they would miss out on a HUGE amount of upgrade business, because people simply would stop upgrading their OS.
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>>If MS was smaller, say like Apple, they could take a calculated risk and make the kind of huge and unapologetic leap like Apple did when they moved from OS9 to OSX, backward compatibility be damned. When my Mac OS9 -compatible apps stopped working in OSX, that's when I jumped off the Apple Cart, and never climbed back on. Not because I was PO'd at Apple or felt that OSX was somehow inferior, mind you, but rather because I made a simple business decision at that point. I moved all my development efforts to Windows -only apps, because I knew that their backward compatibility record was solid enough to bet my little farm on it.
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>>Call it a case study, if you will.
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>>Pertti
