I downloaded a copy of SP1 from Microsoft last week (as a "Microsoft Partner" I can get it in advance). It is already installed on both our laptops and works fine. One of the reasons they are holding off the general release until next month is these compatibility problems. Apparently it also has problems with some drivers. They say that the automatic updating system is being configured to recognise as many of these potential problems as possible and to prevent installation until the relevant driver or software is updated. So if people have any of the known problem products they will not be offered SP1 and if they try to install manually they will get suitable warnings. Looking at the list on that story, I think the only two programs that are likely to have a significant number of users are Trend Micro Internet Security and Zone Alarm Security Suite. These are both from major companies who will almost certainly have the issues fixed before the official SP1 release. Overall SP1 seems to have fixed many of the silly niggles with Vista and made it into a stable and viable operating system. Things like file copying across a network which was a bit of a mess in Vista as released now works properly in SP1 (though do I wonder how they managed to break something so fundamental in an operating system). A lot of businesses are holding off migrating to vista until SP1 is available and launch issues settled. Those who remember that far back may recall that there were some similar issues with Windows 2000 SP2 (which made some major changes to the way parts work) and to a letter extent with Windows XP SP2. Apple broke support for legacy OS9 applications on one of the 10.x updates (10.2 to 10.3 I think). So Microsoft Office 2001 won't run on OSX 10.4 at all, but Microsoft Office 2000 will run fine on Vista. Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10 update broke quite a few things too, mostly driver issues (wireless and video). It is always a difficult balance between making progress and improvements, and supporting legacy applications or applications that do things in non-official ways. If an operating system publisher is going to advance, improve and update their product there will inevitably be a few applications etc that have problems. Also note that Microsoft are providing information about these problems themselves. Such honesty is a refreshing change for Microsoft who have kept problems quiet in the past. Would you prefer Microsoft to own up to problems or for others to report them?
Out of probably tens of thousands of Windows Vista applications out there we have just twelve that may have problems with Vista SP1. In most cases it is probably due to the applications not playing by the rules. Problems with just twelve applications is hardly a good reason to dismiss Vista SP1 completely. MacOS X 10.0 broke just about every OS-9 application unless you fudged it by installing OS-9 with OS X (which resulted in numerous crashes). By OS X 10.2 they had made that fudge unavailable, so you had to throw away ALL your older applications. That was a much more major incompatibility issue than a dozen applications on Vista SP1, yet the Mac users conveniently forget about it when looking for reasons to trash Windows Vista. Vista will run the vast majority of earlier Windows programs (back to Win95 era) with no problems at all. I think six month after SP1 is released would be the time to upgrade to Vista. By then any bugs in SP1 will have been sorted and publishers of other software will have good Vista SP1 versions or patches available. It took a while for XP to settle down and become established and reliable too. I worked in corporate IT then and we continued to use 2000 on new PCs for at least 18 months after XP arrived. Having said that I have had no problems with Vista on my laptop. The main niggle with file copying has been sorted in SP1. It has never crashed or frozen. But if all the software you use works on XP then there is no point in upgrading to Vista. XP will be supported for security updates for at least another three years and doesn't need such powerful hardware as Vista.
And during the 6 year span of XP, only a few applications broke in the middle with the introduction of Service packs. Meanwhile the vast majority of applications written for windows XP have been directly compatible with the 6 year life of XP, and most also work for Windows 2000 and Vista. In fact most Windows 95 programs work all the way through to and including Vista. Hell, a lot of DOS and Windows 3.1 programs (12+ years old) still work on XP / Vista. The same time span of compatibility can not be said of MacOS. Oh, and there's also compatibility issues with Leopard, Apple isn't immune to this. http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/compat.html
The reason compatibility was cut for anything below mac OS X was because we changed like everything about the operating system >.> it wasn't even based on the same thing as the past versions! Besides, when i had Mac 9 and whatever the other one was, it put me off Macs I only came back when OS X was perfected ^_^ and its pretty damn good now.
Well, you know that I don't usually defend Windows... but to be honest, the NT architecture used by Windows XP and Vista is as different from Windows 9x's Chicago architecture, as the Mac OS Classic architecture is from OS X. While high-level APIs are the same (that was implemented in OS X to a limited extent with the now deprecated Carbon), the operating system itself is totally different. In fact, it is correct and recommended to consider Windows NT and Windows 9x as two different (and architecturally unrelated) platforms. This can be noticed because backwards compatibility, while very good and certainly better than that of OS X, is not perfect. Low-level programs such as device drivers, disk utilities etc. are very platform-specific; as expected, a driver for Windows 98 won't work on Windows 2000 or XP (and much less Vista with its new driver model), but it's likely to work on Me or even 95 in some cases. Other components of the operating system are quite different as well: for example, 16-bit Windows software runs natively on Windows 9x but under Windows NT they have to run on top of a "hidden" virtual machine (NTVDM)
