It's the responsibility of the vendor to decide if they want to support a particular operating system. Deciding not to, as with Vista after it's been officially released for over a year, can create adverse affects with one's customers. Not supporting Linux, for example, doesn't
seem to bother most automation companies.
However, Microsoft customers purchase their software with a certain expectation of backward compatibility. It's a sticky issue since they have the market so dominated - for example, the US government isn't supposed to specify brands with purchases - they've decided that Microsoft has superseded that notion and is now a
standard. But even Microsoft has to listen to its customers at some point. I've read all over the place that, overall, Vista
hasn't been well received and hasn't sold the numbers that they expected. That said, it's pretty dominant and MS can do what they want.
So in the end, it's in Microsoft's best interests to make backward compatibility easy for vendors. I know/think the following support Vista: Wonderware, Inductive Automation, Iconics, Citect (I think). I'm not sure about Siemens. If Rockwell's the only show in town that
doesn't support Vista, that's bad for them. That said, I haven't heard anyone specifically recommend Vista over XP for industrial systems. (The new Iconics package may be an exception to this).
Open Source is a sweet thing, but for some reason sucks for our industry at this stage of the game. All it would take are a few good developers/projects to turn this around. Open source isn't really the answer to the Vista question, because we're most likely talking about open source projects that run on Windows, which would face the same problem of keeping updated for Vista
That said -
Java is the bomb in terms of compatibility! The reason is that instead of code being compiled for a certain operating system, with changing libraries and dependencies to worry about, it's compiled for the fictitious Java Virtual Machine. Each operating system then runs it's own version of a Java Runtime Engine. Sun's on top of the project, which is open source. But really, since Java is such a HUGE CUSTOMER, nobody would want to come out with a serious operating system without Java support. So in the end, your program magically works on any MS operating system, Macs, Linux, etc. A side effect is that you don't get the
benefit or
bloat of hundreds of thousands of lines of code that MS will let you access.
You're right - people with deeper pockets make these decisions. But it's because the little guys like you and me support it.
craig_avanzar said:
Perhaps. Would you agree that both share some of the load to develop firmware/ software that is compatible in a market that is dominated by one more than the other? When M$ decides to take their product line in a totally different direction with so much investment by the end user, does it not sound reasonable that there be some collaboration with manufacturers of products that are based on the previous operating system to make a smooth transition to the new system? Or is it better to do what you want, when you want just because you can and the alternatives are limited. I kind of see where Nathan comes from when he talks about open source now. But what do I know. I'm just the end user paying to keep up with things that are moving out of my control.
Smarter people than me make all the big decisions. Or at least people with deeper pockets. Just my 2 cents.
Sorry about stepping on this post. Bad form on my part.
