Viele Com­pu­ter­be­darfte fra­gen sich immer wie­der: Warum genau hat der bei­nahe zehn Jahre alte Inter­net Explo­rer 6, eine Ansamm­lung von Bugs, Sicher­heits­lü­cken und eit­ri­gen Pest­beu­len, noch immer bei­nahe 20 Pro­zent Markt­an­teil? Das kann doch nicht der Ernst die­ser Leute sein!

Die Ant­wort, viel­leicht die beste, die jemals gege­ben wer­den wird, gibt Peter Bright im Rah­men eines gro­ßen Arti­kels zu einem eigent­lich ganz ande­ren Thema.

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. These applications—I’ve worked on a few myself—are typi­cally crummy affairs. The foun­da­tion of such app­li­ca­ti­ons is typi­cally some com­bi­na­tion of Visual Basic 6 and obso­lete ver­si­ons of Access and Excel. On top of this mound of [redac­ted], 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.
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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. 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. But one thing is com­mon to all: they’re all essen­tial to the con­ti­nued ope­ra­tion of the busi­ness. If the app won’t run, the busi­ness won’t run eit­her.
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It is this kind of app­li­ca­tion, more than any other, that cau­ses Microsoft’s sla­vish adhe­rence to back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity. 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. No such joy with the line-of-business app­li­ca­tion. 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.
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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. Many busi­nes­ses have rede­ve­l­o­ped their essen­tial app­li­ca­ti­ons to be deli­vered through a Web brow­ser, in prin­ciple reli­e­ving the ope­ra­ting sys­tem depen­dence. 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. Worse luck for Web deve­l­o­pers; it’s nor­mally ver­sion six of Inter­net Explo­rer. 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.

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