Something's awry because the ComputerWorld article states:
Three of the world's top four OEMs -- Hewlett-Packard Co., Acer Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. -- confirmed last week that they will sell XP-equipped machines up to and including June 30.
Only Dell Inc., ranked second in sales last quarter by Gartner Inc. and IDC, plans to put an end to XP PC sales earlier than that; Dell's deadline is June 18, this Wednesday.
How does Microsoft try so hard to be backwards compatible? It seems to me that they try to do the exact opposite, with version lock-in in programs like Word. OpenOffice can handle more versions of Word files than any version of Word ever could.
Or maybe everyone's going to alternatives like FreeBSD and Linux, where sales don't really count because so much of it is gotten for free. Why pay for UNIX or M$ when you could have something just as good or much, much better for much, much less?
How does Microsoft try so hard to be backwards compatible? It seems to me that they try to do the exact opposite, with version lock-in in programs like Word. OpenOffice can handle more versions of Word files than any version of Word ever could.
It's not as elegant as Ruby's puts a == b ? 'first option' : 'second option' either.
Or maybe everyone's going to alternatives like FreeBSD and Linux, where sales don't really count because so much of it is gotten for free. Why pay for UNIX or M$ when you could have something just as good or much, much better for much, much less?