Author: Ted Roche
Posted: 2015-06-16 at 14:26:11
On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 2:50 PM, Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> wrote:
>
> Or maybe, Microsoft should quit cutting us off at the knees.
I really think we agree on this issue, but seem to be using different
ways to say it.
Microsoft as a vendor does not have my interests nor those of my
clients at heart. Their means of making money is by forcing me to
upgrade to products I don't need with features I don't want, and make
me update software which was meeting my customer's needs, often
breaking working software. For large and complex line-of-business
applications, this can be costly to the point of infeasible.
If a vendor so poorly meets my needs, I conclude I need to seek out
other vendors.
> Your argument could be used to say not to use VFP.
Yes, it could, although I did not advance that point. VFP is a
delightfully capable product that fits a unique niche. Unfortunately,
VFP's owner is not interesting in promoting it. Again, if the
interests of the two parties don't align...
I worked very closely with Microsoft as an MVP, an active beta tester,
a "partner" in various "Partner Networks" over the years, a speaker at
their conferences, and an attendee at various NDA functions, in hopes
of getting them to see that perspective. Overall, I think I helped
prolong FoxPro's life. While the product had a long run, I've
concluded I need to diversify the tools I can offer to my clients, for
their benefit and mine.
>> Commercial and proprietary OSes are going to do what they want to do,
>> not what necessarily what you want.
>
> Do you really think that I do not know this?
>
You complained that a 1990's 16-bit utility built to run on DOS won't
run in the latest 64-bit OS that includes a 32-bit emulator to run
Windows-on-Windows for 15-year-backward compatibility. The CMD shell
may look a lot like DOS, but it is not COMMAND.COM. DOS was built with
a lot of assumptions that it owned the entire machine (all 640k!) and
could do whatever it wanted, something you can't do in a
cooperatively-multitasking machine with gigabytes of RAM and 2,4,8 or
more CPUs/threads. If you want to run DOS, you ought to run DOS,
either in a VM or an emulator. Windows hasn't run under DOS since
Windows 98 (okay, WinME, but no one used that), so it's time to run
DOS differently.
I really think your question above, "2) Microsoft broke 16-bit
software on 64-bit Windows 7. Why couldn't
they have just kept the functionality?" has a pretty clear answer: it
was not in their interests. Maintaining a 16-bit interface means a lot
of very old and questionable code would need to be brought along and
re-compiled in a new OS, introducing maintenance costs and security
liabilities. Turning the question around, "why should they have kept
the functionality?" I don't see that there was a downside to them to
drop it.
--
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
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