Bullet point?

Posted Jan 5, 2009 13:11 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Then why bother? by tialaramex
Parent article: Android netbook is a possibility (Inquirer)

The console makers know that back compat is mostly a marketing bullet point, customers (particularly the most profitable ones who buy lots of new games) don't really use the back compat. So it's important to have some sort of offering, but you can't afford to spend much R&D money on it. If it falls out naturally from evolving hardware, great. Otherwise, too bad.

Sorry but the fact that XBox360 and PlayStation3 (both with radical changes in hardware from predeccessors) support any backward compatibility means developers spend millions and millions of dollars to achieve that. Backward compatibility is easy way to solve checken and egg problem: nobody buys your console because there are no games for it - and game developers don't create games because there are no buyers for said games! Microsoft decided to solve the problem by other means: just give money to game deveopers directly - this should be incentive enough. SONY decided that "it's not so important" - and PlayStation3 became a pariah.

Linux developers don't have money to solve the problem "Microsoft way" so the fact that they ignore compatibility problem and talk about "Linux on consumer desktop" is puzzling. There are no way to achieve it - at least with LSB/GNOME/KDE/etc => Linux on consumer desktop is a non- starter. With Android... there are a chance. Small chance to be sure, but a chance...

I think the "enterprise" Linux distributions can do a pretty good job of supporting the same binaries for 10 years or so, via compat packages, configuration of the environment (with judicious symlinks etc.) and so on. It shouldn't be a huge surprise if the same isn't true in Fedora 11 where the OS itself has a life of only 12-13 months.

I don't fault Fedora at all - it's not the system for a consumer desktop, so this level of compatibility is not a requirement.