Yes, the OS must absolutely remain backwardly compatible and, no, it is not
impossible to maintain compatibility while at the same time offering
improvements in function and performance. I understand and accept yours and
Jan's comments about commitment to customers... but it works the other way
around as well. Olympus is a customer of Apple in having chosen to provide Mac
OS support to its own customers. Apple's commitment to its development user
community should be a guarantee that things that previously worked will
continue to work... at least up until the time it becomes necessary to make a
complete technology shift and abandon the old way entirely.
While it's not impossible that application failure after an OS version change
is due to something invalid on the part of the application it's far more likely
that the OS is at fault. In the IBM world that I inhabited we would even bend
over backwards to try to accommodate the customer even in the rare case that
the failure was his own fault.
Chuck Norcutt
> -------Original Message-------
> From: Chris Barker <ftog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [OM] Re: E3 firmware update AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
> Sent: Jan 31 '08 06:47
>
>
> Chuck
>
> I'm not sure that I understand the thrust of your question, but it has
> happened over the last couple of OS upgrades that one or two
> applications have failed. With the latest, Leopard (v10.5),
> Filemaker announced that its current version of Filemaker (v8.5) would
> not work with Leopard and that users should not upgrade with Filemaker
> 8.5 installed. [This is particularly incomprehensible as Filemaker is
> owned by Apple ...]
>
> I take you to mean that the OS should remain backwardly compatible
> with all earlier applications. I am no programmer, much less a
> developer of operating systems, but I should think that that would be
> impossible if you aim for improvements in your OS. Indeed, that's
> probably one of the problems with Windoze, that each upgrade aims for
> backward compatibility and the OS becomes more and more unwieldy to
> cope with legacy systems. Perhaps OS/2 lent itself to that sort of
> upgrade path better than the current GUI-based OSs (I am on the edge
> of my knowledge of OS/2, here :-)).
>
> Upgrading to Leopard has been the most problematic of the OSX
> increments, but all the other up-to-date applications have worked or
> have been upgraded to work "properly" with Leopard. Indeed, all
> applications seemed to work properly for me anyway. But Olympus has
> been pretty tardy with ensuring that it would work, but then it's a
> pretty horrid programme anyway. Jan's point about demonstrating
> commitment to a customer base is a reasonable one, in my view.
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> On 30 Jan 2008, at 14:54, <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > wrote:
>
> > Would some enthusiast Mac supporter please explain to me why this
> > failure of application software to work on different versions of a
> > Mac OS is an application problem. Had this happened to an OS/2
> > application whilst I was manager of OS/2 system and compatibility
> > testing I'd have had a powerful lot of explaining to do to my
> > bosses. New function is wonderful but one *never* breaks old
> > function... even if the app developers did it wrong. Incidentally,
> > this is one thing Microsoft never quite understood while we were
> > jointly working on OS/2 and it took constant vigilance to make sure
> > they didn't alter the API's to suit the whim of the day.
>
>
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