Comment by BrenBarn
6 days ago
I think part of that is because those old Windows apps were distributed and forgotten about. There was no update procedure for many of them, and if there was it was just "buy a new disk" or at most "check the website and download a new EXE". Now that people have always-on internet connections, they expect to be able to get things instantly, and companies then expect to be able to push their updates instantly, and other companies expect that they can push their own update if someone else breaks their API, and so on and so forth until everyone expects everyone to have "the latest version" of everything.
It's the era of constant updates. I find it pretty annoying.
... all presuposing of course that the authors of that code are still around, and still want to make the effort of updating it.
In the enterprise world lots of software is more than a decade old, and no one is prepared to "update" it. The mindset in that space is for things to have longevity.
It's more of a mindset I think. Microsoft is clearly very focused on keeping things running. Apple (as a contrast example) is happy to change architecture, remove 32 bit support, and so on.
I agree it's a mindset, I just mean that that mindset has kind of coevolved with a bunch of other stuff.
Even Microsoft seems to be slipping. It seems like these days the (unstoppable!) Windows updates may actually change functionality and UI, which was much less common in the past. And of course the new versions of Windows are more aggressive about updating. They still maintain backwards compatibility for running third-party programs, but I feel like their mindset used to include more stability in their own software as well.