Perhaps MSFT is betting on all of those older apps being written in primarily in DotNet just like (MSFT thinks) the majority of VFP apps will be when VFP lifesupport is over for good :o)



>>Nope, not at all. People said the same thing when we started moving to 32 bit.
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>>Microsoft has stated that Windows Server 2008 will be their last 32 bit OS. The time is coming.
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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
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>>>There is simply too much 32 bit inheritance to allow for windows versions that only allow 64 bit programs. It would kill Microsoft to go to 64 bit only. They have to provide a solution to 32 bit programs. For the same reason current Windows version still support 16 bit programs (FPD 2.x and FPW 2.6 still run on those).
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>>>Again, FUD, FUD..