On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 6:40 PM, Andrew S. Baker <[email protected]> wrote: >>>shaky foundation? > > The DOS, Win16 underpinnings...
And even Win32 (NT/9x) didn't have anything approaching a common installer system until 2000 or so, and side-by-side DLL installs didn't show up until... what, Win XP? XP SP2? .NET was supposed to solve all these problems, but I haven't really seen that materialize. Even Microsoft publishes stuff that demands a particular release of the .NET Framework. :-( > Installed base is great when everything has been well laid out. Not so > great, when you're bound to earlier suboptimal decisions... As a wise man once said: Indeed. ;-) The Windows platform's greatest advantage (the huge base of software available for it) is also one of it's biggest problems. There's so much stuff out there, and Windows has changed so much over time, that Microsoft can't change *anything* without breaking *something*. While I think some of this can be blamed on Microsoft, since they really should have seen some of it coming and were in a position to do something about it, some of it's just bad luck. And regardless of fault, it's what we have now, and fixing it isn't going to be easy, even for Microsoft. :-( -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
