good points

Posted Apr 4, 2016 21:25 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: good points by Wol
Parent article: Ubuntu on Windows

> Sorry, I call bullshit here ... "Dos ain't done til Lotus won't run".
This is bullshit.

> You could pretty much GUARANTEE that EVERY rev of Windows would contain API breaks that were very damaging to apps that MS considered competitors.
Nope. MS went to great pains to keep applications running. ALL of them, up to including custom workarounds for some apps.

good points

Posted Apr 10, 2016 14:25 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

Then why did EVERY upgrade to Windows break my "working fine" copies of WordPerfect?

WFWG. Office95. Win98. XP.

I've left out NT4/NT2000 - I don't remember problems with them. But the number of upgrades and/or emergency bug-fixes you needed to keep WordPerfect going as Windows changed underneath was awful.

Cheers,
Wol

good points

Posted Apr 10, 2016 14:50 UTC (Sun) by reedstrm (guest, #8467) [Link] (2 responses)

ISTR one of those windows upgrades involving Microsoft giving WordPerfect early access to some APIs, then yanking/ not releasing parts that wp depended on, but that word did not, just before the release. Result: wp broke on upgrade. Pretty sure there was a lawsuit.

good points

Posted Apr 10, 2016 15:14 UTC (Sun) by reedstrm (guest, #8467) [Link] (1 responses)

Or that it came out in discovery or testimony during the drdos lawsuit.

good points

Posted Apr 10, 2016 16:11 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Also ISTR that the Microsoft applications used to use special undocumented APIs that could do convenient and powerful things and were (a) unavailable to third-party applications, (b) not part of any stability or support guarantees because they weren't part of the documented interface, so even if a third-party developer figured out one of them for Windows version N they had no guarantee that their code would keep working on Windows version N+1.