New article in the Economist criticizing Linux usability

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Tue Apr 3 15:28:00 UTC 2012


On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 10:12 AM, Andrej Marjan <andrej-igvx78u1SeH3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> All else notwithstanding, Microsoft does have a technical advantage that is
> important to non-technical businesses: outstanding backwards compatibility
> at the ABI level.

Linux includes an ABI layer that emulates systems going back as far as
SCO.  I seem to recall one of our members having some involvement in
implementing that.  :-)

> What they've achieved isn't pretty or cheap to do, but it is a technical
> feat. It allows people to run crufty old in-house tools whose source has
> been lost many years ago on the latest version of Windows, and it allows
> them to run crufty old enterprise monster systems similarly, without having
> to upgrade everything all at once.

It's nice, when it works.

OS/2 was generally better at doing that; OS/2 "Warp" did a pretty fine
job of emulating Windows 3.1, and was sufficiently good at that as to
undermine the market for companies to actually write applications for
OS/2.  "Why bother with a native app, when you can just target Windows
3.1?"

I don't think Microsoft has come anywhere near that level of compatibility.

> This is a big deal: you don't have to spend a penny to remediate the
> compatibility of your crappy in-house tool which just happens to be central
> to an important business process. From a business perspective, the money
> spent to remediate that tool merely for technical compatibility, is wasted.
> It gives the business no return.

In practice, there's a pretty hefty risk of Windows apps breaking
between versions of Windows.  It may have been less for Vista versus
Windows 7 than it has been in the past; that's more a matter of the
existing ABIs being sufficiently functional that Microsoft didn't need
to make breakage-causing changes than anything else.

The company that has actually demonstrated *enormous* competence in
this area is IBM, where it's pretty likely that there are still
"mouldy old 1401 decks" still running today on Z-Series machines via a
series of emulation layers (e.g. - 360 microcode emulator to run the
1401 code, then PPC microcode emulator to run the 360 microcode.)
That would be 50-year-back emulation.
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