This is for windows 7 which was released nearly a decade ago. Apple’s snow leopard released the same year by contrast stopped support 4 years ago. Those who see me comment here know I’m not a windows fan by any means, but some perspective here is important. If Microsoft didn’t support these old operating systems they wouldn’t have these problems.
Mmm… this doesn’t quite sound right. In principle I agree with you but this doesn’t seem like a great example because AFAICT this was a pretty simple bug, just a small mistake with some flags. Unless the argument was that the more times you have to make that change (i.e. the number of OS versions you have to make it to), the more likely you are to screw up? But in that case you still have the same probability of screwing up for any given release; they’re all independent from each other.
People forget things, the people who worked on it may have moved on to other companies. Sometimes older codebases have radically different coding styles, expectations, and norms. Trivial bugs can become knockouts in this context because the code is huge, alien, and you might not be able to use the tools you’re used to. I’ll concede though that supporting old versions of software way longer than anyone should is part of Microsoft’s business model, and they probably should have better accounted for it.
This is for windows 7 which was released nearly a decade ago. Apple’s snow leopard released the same year by contrast stopped support 4 years ago. Those who see me comment here know I’m not a windows fan by any means, but some perspective here is important. If Microsoft didn’t support these old operating systems they wouldn’t have these problems.
Mmm… this doesn’t quite sound right. In principle I agree with you but this doesn’t seem like a great example because AFAICT this was a pretty simple bug, just a small mistake with some flags. Unless the argument was that the more times you have to make that change (i.e. the number of OS versions you have to make it to), the more likely you are to screw up? But in that case you still have the same probability of screwing up for any given release; they’re all independent from each other.
People forget things, the people who worked on it may have moved on to other companies. Sometimes older codebases have radically different coding styles, expectations, and norms. Trivial bugs can become knockouts in this context because the code is huge, alien, and you might not be able to use the tools you’re used to. I’ll concede though that supporting old versions of software way longer than anyone should is part of Microsoft’s business model, and they probably should have better accounted for it.
One step forward, two steps back.