RE: MS Vista and iSeries Access support

Steve,

Your statement was "MSFT is really good about maintaining backwards 
compatibility"....  This has NEVER been a focus of MS....  With MS, when they 
come out with their next generation of development tools, one must either 
decide to abandon their current projects and start again in the new platform, 
OR they can just stay a a backlevel release and continue until MS drops support 
for their version.

Backward compatibility is the traditional hallmark of the IBM midrange.  IBM 
understood the value of stability to business, and has gone to great lengths to 
maintain backward compatibility.  I do think this focus on backward 
compatibility has hampered IBMs attempts to get our community to move towards 
newer technologies, but that's not IBMs fault...

However, with MS, one is forced to adopt (buy) new technologies every few 
years, if one wants to remain current.  MSFT sales are, at this point, largely 
driven off product update cycles.  

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 7:10 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: MS Vista and iSeries Access support


On 11/13/06, DeLong, Eric <EDeLong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<Steve said...>
what technical reason could there be that it would not work? MSFT is
really good about maintaining backwards compatibility.
<End>

Really?  That sure doesn't seem to match MY experience with MSFT.....

Have you been drinking Mr. Bill's happy juice again?

If not, then perhaps you can explain what you mean by this....

I can try ... What problems have you had with MSFT software?  My
experience as a programmer is that MSFT is by far the best in terms of
the programability of their products. Linux does not have an exception
handling model, no basic call stack support and knows nothing of
managed code. The end result is a Perl program knows nothing of Java
which cant interact with SQL procedures, PHP, etc. At least no where
to the degree that modern applications need these languages to work
together.  The i5 is a bit better because it has 15 YO ILE but the
grafting on of PASE binaries and SQL procedures has been kludgy at
best. MSFT's .NET is proving itself to be everything the smart people
who created it said it would be.   Programming .NET, esp at the
beginner's level, has never been easier.   They made over $4B in pre
tax profits this past quarter - that tells you a lot of customers like
their products.

-Steve