> At 07:34 PM 5/14/00 +0200, you wrote:
> .
> >
> >How do you expect them to pull this off? All (or at least most) old
> >application must still run otherwise people won't upgrade, and
> >application makers aren't likely to abandon their customers by
> >mandating them to install the new OS.
>
> Of course old apps will still work, but Ms has a excellent bludgeon to
> force developpers to upgrade and support new features, the 'win-xx
> compatible logo'. If Unicode is part of the logo, new apps will
> support Unicode.
Sure they will support Unicode, but supporting ANSI (ASCII)
as well is not that hard, especially since it is what they
support now.
> And applications makers will sell old versions
> of their applications for old versions of the Os. New features will
> work under the new Os. This pattern has already happened for
> Win16.
It happend for Win16 because
1. Win16 as an API sucked and it was beyond backward compatible repair.
2. Easier handling of data structures larger than 64k.
3. 32-bit mode offered 32-bit instructions which was faster
4. 32-bit mode offered memory protection
5. It was a pain maintain both a Win16 and Win32 release.
(Yes, I have done it, I hated it).
So what has Unicode to offer for people using ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1)?
Not much.
How large part of the world market is using Latin-1?
Most I should guess, especially if we are countng
_paying_ customers.
Note I'm not against Unicode, but I don't think you will see
many companies making Unicode only applications.
> If Wine don't support new applications, it don't matter if it's called
> alpha, 1.0 or 9.34; it may be interesting for users, but not
> for business
> and developpers.
That goes without without saying.
> And just another company like Corel could be
> much more interesting for the project than 5000000 end-users.
True.
