Re: How many times must Apple make such DRASTIC architecture changes?

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Roy Smith wrote:
> "Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Perhaps an interesting thing to count would be the number of
> > times a Mac owner had to buy a copy of Word or Photoshop...
>
>
> I've been forced to buy a new copy of Word twice.
>
> The first time was when 4.0D no longer ran on the OS that came with a new 
> machine (this might have been when I got my 7200 with MacOS 7.something).  
> The next time was when I was forced to upgrade to Word v.x, not because 
> what I had before wouldn't run any more, but because everybody I was 
> exchanging documents with had upgraded and I was sick of not being able to 
> open docs people sent me.

Yes, "data format" creep is a significant problem with any
application that defines its own data format.

The last time I upgraded Word (to 97) was for this very reason.

Applications for editing standard files, like .jpg's or
.avi's tend not to suffer from this problem as much.

-michael

8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/