Two-thirds of XP apps not natively supported on Windows 7?
Michael Brown February 17 2010 04:10:01 AM
Yep, APC magazine is quoting a Forrester report that says that you can expect two-thirds of your XP apps to have problems running on Windows 7.These are scary numbers, if true.
A long way from the glory days of Windows 95 for Microsoft. Back then, it could hold back Designed for Windows 95 stickers for applications unless they also ran without modification on Windows NT. In a flash, NT, which had been struggling for apps, suddenly had thousands of them! A genius move on Microsoft's part.
So, how come it can't manage the same trick between XP and 7? Remember, 95 and NT had completely different underlying architectures. 95 was still not much more than graphical front-end for MS-Dos, and contained tons of 16-bit code, whereas NT was designed from the ground-up to be proper 32-bit, pre-emptive, multi-tasking OS. And yet, apps that ran on 95 could still run natively on NT. XP and Windows 7, on the other hand, are both based on that same NT architecture. There's been some changes along the way, but surely XP and 7 are closer together than 95 and NT ever were? Yet it seems that the majority of XP apps won't run on 7. Bizarre.
And no way is 7's "XP Mode" the answer. You think businesses are going to support users supporting two operating systems, when most of them struggle to understand even one? I think not.
In fact, I went through something similar when my then company were contemplating the move from Mac OS 8/9 to Mac OS X. Mac OS X had an OS 9 emulation mode called "Classic". (This was far more justifiable than Windows 7's XP Mode, because Mac OS X was completely and utterly different to its predecessors). Still, we wanted nothing to do with it, for the reason that I've already given. We told our vendors to either provide OS X versions of their apps or we'd find other vendors that did.
That's okay for bought-in apps though. It's your own, in-house developed stuff that's usually the problem.
The perfect opportunity to investigate a move to Ubuntu, IMHO!!
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