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Comment by vvpan | Hacker News Reader

And the lesson is that making things that last isn't good for the business.

That's not the point at all. I'd say the lesson is to understand what your customers want and not fight them on it.

The first iPhone is as usable today as Windows XP is. The difference is that the features present in its successors (and the features NOT taken away) were enough to make the users upgrade (or, depending on your perspective, bad enough to make them jump ship).

This isn't me defending Apple or putting down Micrsoft. We might see this in the next few years with MacBooks or the iPhone as the perceived quality of OS X declines. My own wife won't let me buy her a new iPhone because she is happy with iOS 6.

Or people hear in the news how bad the new version is (e.g. Vista) and avoid it.

Changing operating systems, especially in the PC world, is very disruptive to users. Especially non-savvy ones.

The hell I went through when my mom got a new PC with Windows 8.

I can't imagine Windows 10.

I've been running the Windows 10 preview, and it looks like Windows 8 with a better window manager.

Yes, that's definitely the lesson, not, "make it trivial for your customers to replace your old product with your new product."

Given the number of platform PCs (slap together Dell, HP and the like), and the sheer number of drives, motherboards and power supplies that die, and people unwilling to pay someone $90 + materials to replace them vs. getting a new one... I'm surprised XP has as many users as it does.

I think it is partly due to the failure of Vista, which also reminds me that the reason Server 2003 got an extra year of support is that they waited until after Vista SP1 to release Server 2008.

For some values of "things". Some software should last a long time. Some software (like UIs) shouldn't, and businesses should plan for that.

Why shouldn't UIs last a long time?

That's a great question. I see no reason a UI should change often, that seems counter-intuitive.

so true. I think there's only been a handful of major paradigm shifts in UI on the web that have justified a complete overhaul of a perfectly good UI (pure HTML -> CSS in the late 90s and then the rise of jquery/ajax and to a lesser extent the shift towards responsive and flat design.)

I guess a big OS is a different beast though as it's a billion dollar project in itself - I think at that point they just tweak a bunch of UI so people think they're getting something new.

I was thinking about this, and it seems like Desktop UIs can be preserved for much longer time than some of the modern web ones.

Once you have the whole application, files and version of the OS it was running on in an emulator, you can practically run it anywhere.

Not so with things on the web :(

Take for example HRBlock - it has (or had?) a desktop version, and web version. I've used to desktop, but moved to the web, but makes me wonder - would I be able to review my data on it, 10 years ahead? Granted... I can pull all the data I need (after all taxes follow specific forms), but there are applications for which this is simply not possible.

Imagine if Photoshop/Maya/MotionBuilder/3DSMax/Word/Office were running exclusively on the web (and to some point some of these do). Now what happens in 20 years? Would someone be able to open the files I've created in them?

Yes, there would be someone... But that one would be the old desktop app, running under some VM, maybe under your new fancy watch/or whatever device - but you can still view it.

But not so about the web. If the application was purely done on the web, and even though you were able to export files/data from it, it comes to a point where you might not be able to show this data in much later years.

I still can run my favourite Apple ][, Oric, and protected mode (unreal mode!) DOS thanks for the fact that the application was all there, boxed, and if you've collected all patches ever released - you can relive it again!

Ahh... enough with the rant, you can't catch the web, it captures you :) lol

wow I had never even considered that angle. We are at the mercy of application servers that necessarily WONT be there in a decade. Would be amazing to see a shift towards running some of these things client-end or on a hybrid client-cloud that let you take images of the application state and datasets. Security is an issue but it always will be - if you could defer a lot of the work to the client you could save costs and preserve the web for future generations. Well - 99% of the web is garbage and meta anyway - the idea that the integral text-only parts of wikipedia can fit on a cheap flash drive amazes a lot of people.

Windows XP wasn't broken. I can't say that of its "fix."

Because our physical UI hardware changes drastically, all the time.

Screens change size, and pixel density is always increasing.

Input mechanisms change drastically too. 10 or 15 years ago, almost everything was mice. Now, there are more touchscreens than mice, and there are a hell of a lot of trackpads too.

It depends on which business you are talking about. The provider, or the customer.

It's good for the brand though.

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