The Engineering 7 blog has a post on how Microsoft hopes to ensure application compatibility between Windows Vista and Windows 7. “Delivering a new release of Windows includes a major effort to insure that applications continue to function as well on the new release as they have on the previous release. At the PDC we talked about some of the new areas of Windows Vista that reduced this level of compatibility, such as changes we made around the OS security model. With Windows 7 we renewed our engineering efforts to maintain compatibility. As with device testing, compatibility testing is an effort that spans the entire engineering organization, though we also have a group that is dedicated to this effort.”
Well, duh. Of course Microsoft wants to maintain compatibility. I don’t get the point of posting this article.
Do you actually use Windows day to day anymore? MS does not care as much about compatibility as you think. Many things have broken over the years, some really obvious stuff too. They only support a small subset of older stuff that they personally find interesting, not everything under the sun. I do not expect Win7 to be any better than Vista (or XP). Hopefully it won’t be any worse!
I haven’t tried 7 yet, but I’ve read about something called libraries, and new ways to organize files (esp media). I wonder if older file managers will be compatable. Anybody tried Directory Opus yet ?