frankieh wrote:
Thats not gonna be too much of a big deal shortly... there are several things in the industry now related to MicroSoft, that are going to help Linux quiet abit..
- Allot of apps will in the next few years need to be swapped to Win64, and will require substantial code changes anyway. (see below.)
- Microsoft themselves are going to break allot of their own backwards compatability, in fact they have already done so.
--- Win2003 already breaks some software from win2000/XP.
--- win XP service pack2 breaks more software.
--- Windows Longhorn will break huge reams of existing software... it is to "innovative" to be backwards compatable.
And you think that is the end?? Microsoft knows that in order to keep people upgrading, they know they can make it different, as long as they make it seem easier then reworking the programs to run on linux...
But how long is that arguement going to last??? after Longhorn, microsoft are going to have to change everything even more to justify to people how upgading to whatever new they come up with is worth it..
Eventually developers are going to get sick of rewriting their apps each time MS come up with something they think people just have to have.... eventually they will realise that this is just more microsoft FUD and that in the long run, writting apps for a totally open API is simply better, particularly if the alternative is re-writing their apps every 5 years or so.
FrankieH; Don't forget that Linux is gaining a lot of popularity and momentum. That alone, will push a lot of software companies to seriously consider coming out with re-worked versions of their apps, and many are already doing exactly that.
In many cases, well-estasblished apps written for Linux years ago have been improving by leaps and bounds, and as people start to migrate over to Linux, they'll start depending on those apps, instead of seeking commercial or proprietary ones.
One last thing here. One of Microsoft's long term goals is to migrate most of their apps to web-based systems which will be sold as subscription services - ie; Microsoft Office. That's one of their prime reasons for coming up with "dotNet".
Part of Microsoft's game plan is to be able to sell those services across all platforms, since much of the web already is platform-agnostic. It's the easiest way to capture a higher marketshare.
So, don't be too surprised to see a lot of companies coming out with web-based applications in the near future. If companies can build apps which will work just as well on Linux and MacOS, as they do on Windows, compatibility will take a distinct move up the ladder.
Microsoft also knows that this is one way that they can continue to build crappy applications, without all those nasty crash events happening, simply by moving the app from the hard drive to the web.
It also means that they'll probably try to sell it's merits by promoting the stability factor of the web.
ROTFL.
Also, this also explains why the new Windows ( currently due out sometime this decade ! ) will have a newer version of Internet Explorer (something like version 8) which will be tuned to take advantage of the new web-based apps that Microsoft will be selling. Don't be surprised if they call LongHorn something like Internet Commander or something, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the core of the OS. Certainly would explain why the tried to merge IE 5 through 6 into the OS, and why Bill Gates was buying up cablevision companies in Europe a few years ago. Who else is gonna supply that much broadband to a user-base?
This could be very amusing. Anyone remember Win98's "active desktop"? You make your whole dektop environment dependent on the thing that is most likely to crash. Even Windows users didn't buy that for long.
Sir Robin
-- "If the lion could speak, we would not understand it." - Wittgenstein
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Universitesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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