Windows 8 means a faster treadmill

The release of Windows 8 marks a change in Microsoft's approach to backwards compatibility. Microsoft has shifted its position from "compatible at just about everything" to "things change a lot and your old things may not work".

Windows 8 and its Metro interface re-define the programming of applications. On x86 processors, legacy applications can run in "Windows 7 mode". On ARM processors, legacy applications... cannot run. And while Windows 8 offers Windows 7 mode, Microsoft has made no promise of such a feature in future releases.

With the shift to WinRT and Metro, Microsoft has started a countdown clock for the lives of all Windows applications in existence.

In the past, Microsoft maintained compatibility for just about every application. Even vintage DOS applications would run under Windows XP (and probably still run under Windows 7). That compatibility came at no small expense, not only in development and testing costs, but at opportunity costs. (New development was constrained by the design decisions of previous releases.)

Users, developers, and support teams are on a treadmill, with new technologies and releases arriving faster than before. The good old days of decade-long technology planning have been replaced with a range of two or three years.

People can get upset about the faster pace of the treadmill, but they have nowhere to go.

Apple has "revved" its platform a number of times, changing the processor, the operating system, the user interface, and the device form factor. The folks working on Linux are working on similar changes.

If Microsoft believes that it can be more profitable in a new market, or if it believes that the current market is not profitable, then I believe that they will move to the new market. It's customer's problems with lack of backward compatibility are not Microsoft's problem.

Interestingly, corporations long ago lobbied for shorter depreciation schedules for computing equipment. They successfully got the depreciation for equipment reduced to ... three years. Now Apple and Microsoft seem to be agreeing, indicating that equipment really is obsolete after three years. (Except that they include software in the definition of "equipment".)



I'm not sure that this faster pace is a good thing. I'm also not sure that I like it. But I do know this: it's happening. The question is not how to stop it, or how to avoid it, but how to cope with it. How do we live in a world when technology changes (dramatically) every three or maybe two years?