<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>scarface74</author><text>And how much has it cost Microsoft? Apple was able to successfully take the base of MacOS and port it’s operating system to a much lower spec phone back in 2007 and came to dominate the smart phone market (in profit they only thing that matters), the tablet market where MS failed repeatedly, not to mention it was able to port the base OS to everything from Watches and TV set  top boxes - all things that Microsoft tried and failed at.&lt;p&gt;MS being so concerned with backwards compatibility has slowed down its ability to move fast into new markets even compared to Google.&lt;p&gt;If you are “building your software” for desktop PCs (or Macs) , you’re building on top of market that is becoming less important every year. There is no energy or investments going into desktop computers besides games and even that market is small. The only companies making real money in computer software are Microsoft and Adobe and even they are pivoting more toward browser based software and mobile.&lt;p&gt;Do you think that Apple should still bundle a PPC emulator with modern Macs? A 68K emulator?&lt;p&gt;Not being willing to drop legacy code comes with its own costs in maintenance and increases the vulnerability surface. Just the fact that there are over a half dozen ways to represent a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities, not to mention all of the other legacy cruft.</text><parent_chain><item><author>chimi</author><text>This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility -- their commitment to the investment of labor. If you build your software on Apple, there almost certainly will come a point in the future where your code will cease to work.&lt;p&gt;Microsoft has made a commitment to backward compatibility. It&amp;#x27;s such a huge benefit. I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for &lt;i&gt;decades&lt;/i&gt;. I don&amp;#x27;t have to upgrade my development environment. I don&amp;#x27;t have to buy a new laptop to run the latest xcode. I never have to worry that my years of investment into my own software platform will be worthless three years from now or require unknown amounts of recoding to work.&lt;p&gt;This is not true of Apple, Ruby, or almost any open source project.&lt;p&gt;I want to continue moving forward all the time. I loathe the requirement to go back and redo what I&amp;#x27;d already done and works. It wastes my time, my money, and my confidence in my vendor.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Apple&apos;s list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina</title><url>https://thetapedrive.com/235-apps-incompatible-with-catalina</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>vortico</author><text>I feel the same. I started a project just &lt;i&gt;four&lt;/i&gt; years ago, and now I feel that I&amp;#x27;ll need to rewrite a huge portion of the graphics code to work with future Mac versions.&lt;p&gt;I also have a lesser fear that in order for my application to work on some future version of Windows, I&amp;#x27;ll need to deal with code signing and directory access rights nonsense in order for customers to think that the software &amp;quot;works properly&amp;quot;. But that&amp;#x27;s just speculative. Apple&amp;#x27;s already doing it.</text><parent_chain><item><author>chimi</author><text>This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility -- their commitment to the investment of labor. If you build your software on Apple, there almost certainly will come a point in the future where your code will cease to work.&lt;p&gt;Microsoft has made a commitment to backward compatibility. It&amp;#x27;s such a huge benefit. I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for &lt;i&gt;decades&lt;/i&gt;. I don&amp;#x27;t have to upgrade my development environment. I don&amp;#x27;t have to buy a new laptop to run the latest xcode. I never have to worry that my years of investment into my own software platform will be worthless three years from now or require unknown amounts of recoding to work.&lt;p&gt;This is not true of Apple, Ruby, or almost any open source project.&lt;p&gt;I want to continue moving forward all the time. I loathe the requirement to go back and redo what I&amp;#x27;d already done and works. It wastes my time, my money, and my confidence in my vendor.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Apple&apos;s list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina</title><url>https://thetapedrive.com/235-apps-incompatible-with-catalina</url></story>