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Change Windows (or IE) too much, and these essential-but-awful applications stop working.
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It's great for Microsoft to have this entrenched, committed user-base, of course-it's a great money-maker-but it serves as a huge restriction on what the company can do. This problem has been a thorn in Redmond's side for many years.
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The result ends up being the same companies have to stick with software that's well past its use-by date, because if they upgrade, important things stop working. Worse luck for Web developers it's normally version six of Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, these Web apps have all too often suffered the same fate as their desktop counterparts, leaving them locked in to a particular version of a particular browser. Many businesses have redeveloped their essential applications to be delivered through a Web browser, in principle relieving the operating system dependence.
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One strategy companies have used to free themselves from the problems of such applications has itself caused even more compatibility headaches. If it gets broken by an operating system upgrade-or even a Service Pack or security patch-then there's little option but to refrain from upgrading. No such joy with the line-of-business application.
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Sure, it's important to have some amount of compatibility for regular commercial software, but major applications are supported and actively maintained, so they can be upgraded, or replacements sought. It is this kind of application, more than any other, that causes Microsoft's slavish adherence to backwards compatibility. If the app won't run, the business won't run either. But one thing is common to all: they're all essential to the continued operation of the business. The result is that many of these programs are unmaintained, with no one entirely sure how they work or how it is that they do whatever it is that they do. These applications often grow organically (though you should be thinking "mold" or "bacterial infection" rather than "rose" or "kitten") over a period of years, acting as a time-capsule of sorts-if you want to know how software was written in 1993, there is no better place to look than the bespoke line-of-business application-and they have a tendency to outlast their creators. On top of this mound of, these apps usually contain one or more third-party components to draw graphs or something, from vendors that have long since gone out of business. The foundation of such applications is typically some combination of Visual Basic 6 and obsolete versions of Access and Excel. These applications-I've worked on a few myself-are typically crummy affairs. The bespoke line-of-business application is a common feature of the corporate world, and a thing that has been instrumental in cementing Windows as the corporate desktop OS standard.