Sure, that was perhaps stated a bit strongly.
The 'all eternity' refers specifically to older versions of Windows where backwards compatibility had been a priority for many years as they positioned themselves as business systems, but which was also famously full of security holes (I witnessed an ultrasound machine running on embedded WinXP getting infected with the Blaster worm simply by being connected to the hospital network, can't make that sh*t up) and things like 'dll hell'. In that sense it was not hyperbole but an expression of what MS used to do.
However even that is changing and backward compatibility is problematic in similar or worse way:
In my hospital we've been on Windows 10 for an about 3 years (don't ask what we were running before that). But now all machines have to run Win 10 version 21H2
specifically - or our enterprise software doesn't work (medical imaging review systems, an Electronic Health Record system that runs across several hospitals and so on - and these systems went live
this year) . Forget about Windows 11, none of these will work in any way on Win 11. These are systems used by about 50K users to look after about 2M patients.
Yet no one is blaming Microsoft for these issues, but rather the enterprise software vendors.
Suddenly Apple's apparent short backwards compatibility window (specifically for LC, which I'm not sure even registers with Apple) doesn't seem so bad does it
None of us can know what the issue that led to LC crashing on startup on Sonoma was (perhaps LC can comment rather than seeking answers from Apple). But I'm willing to bet it didn't require a major re-write of the IDE since they got it working quite quickly.
I would also therefore be willing to bet that
most software is unaffected by the new OS. Just because it affected the
one platform we use is not a reason to bemoan Apple's backward compatibility strategy, motives, intelligence or attitude to users.
A quick look online suggests that most software (like Adobe Photoshop 2020) will work fine on Sonoma, so I suspect LC was an unfortunate outlier (can't check myself as waiting on LC to release new versions before upgrading the OS).
Searching specifically for issues with Sonoma I found this reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments ... ty_issues/
one of the comments there stated
app compatibility lists from beta releases indicates that Sonoma broke fewer existing apps than some (most?) other major versions did at those stages, so this one might be less risky to update to sooner.
So given that LC is likely one of the few outliers to the majority of software that works on Sonoma, is this even a valid discussion?