Lalalandia
Member
Sad that Microsoft Windows has better BC than Apple Iphone.
It's not sad it's by design. People complain about the bloat that comes with each new Windows release but the fact is a significant chunk of that is multiple copies of the same dlls for backwards compatibility purposes. MS only deprecated 16 bit apps with Win7 for flips sake despite every cpu since the 386 supporting 32bit operation. MS O/S revenue stream is built off telling business customers that they need to update to the latest O/S for security and feature enhancements but don't worry all of your crappy ancient line of business apps will work just fine*.
Apple's method has always been to flip customers the bird and say 'the new shit is better, deal'. It's why Adobe moved to Windows as the lead platform for Photoshop et al as they were pissed when Apple deprecated the old OS 9 Cocoa API. There is merit to this approach as it's why OSX has such a nice unified look and feel and in particular why it scales so well to arbitrary resolutions but it carries a lot of cost for app developers and businesses. MS for example ha to support 4 or 5 APIs for drawing apps on the Windows desktop which is why you have things like the on screen keyboard not automatically popping up in desktop mode for text fields when it does for Win8 apps. The Win8 API has 'hinting' built in (ie cursor in text field, pop OSK) but WinGUI, VB and the myriad other methods do not offer 'hinting' so the OSK never pops.
*Not entirely I've seen a rough 5-10% incompatibility between XP apps and Win7 for example.