The other day, Kevin sent out an article written by Joel Spolsky. To make a long story short, he discussed how Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot by not maintaining backwards compatibility. VB.NET isn’t backwards compatible with VB6, .NET 1.1 isn’t backwards compatible with .NET 1.0, etc.
When I first read the article, I didn’t entirely agree with him. Most of the newer technologies Microsoft is developing are really cutting-edge, from a programmers prospective. When I first coded a .NET application in C#, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. .NET is a great library, much easier to use than the Win32 API.
Literally the day after I read the article, Pat came up to me and asked if I was a Microsoft Office guru. I said no, but I could probably answer his question. Here is the question:
I can’ t open the Word documents Tricia is sending me. She says whenever she saves it, it is adding an X to the end of .doc.
Then it really hit me. Joel had predicted the future. His article was written in 2004, and in 2007 I see what he meant. Even though he is talking mainly about API’s, I think it carries over to this document type issue. The Word .doc format has been around in its current form for a long time, since Word 97 I believe. The .docx format is probably better from a programmers standpoint, but not from a users standpoint.
It will be interesting to see if this mentality continues to persist as Microsoft faces more competition in all areas of their business.