Hi Charlie,
Charlie Edmondson said:
In corporate software environments, especially in the CAD world, they have
gotten bitten WAY too many times by the "Just develop for the BETA" trap,
only to find that the actual release software has gotchas out the ying-yang
for those stupid (and foolish) enough to work with the beta.
Sure, I agree, if you develop for a beta version of the OS, inevitably
something will change and some of your development efforts will have been
wasted. Still, this is no worse for Cadence than it is for Adobe or Corel or
any other software company now, is it? So, you spend, I dunno, 120% of the
effort required to get ORCAD working if you wait until Vista is officially
released by instead developing with the betas, but the upside is that you
impress current and potential new customers with your responsiveness. To many
customers, that's worth something. To me it's indicative ofa copmany that's
serious about their software development, rather than just thinking that
software development is a necessary evil required to sell a product to make
money.
Note that getting software to work in Vista really does tend to improve the
software's overall quality, since it forces programmers not to take as many
"shortcuts" as they've been allowed to do (but discouraged from doing so) for
some time now.
Given that ORCAD has had some absurdly stupid bugs in it for many years now --
e.g., the line widths shown in the symbol editor are, except for the skinniest
one, not the same line widths that are shown when you place a symbol on a
capture schematic -- I would suggest that Cadence should do everything it can
to promote an image of being serious about quality software development.
For that matter, just what are the ORCAD programmers sitting around and doing
these days if now working on Vista compatibility and bug fixes? There were
minimal changes between 10.5 and 15.7, after all!
So, big companies wait until the actual, released software (actually, until
at least the first service pack comes out that fixes the worst bugs) before
trying to adapt to the new OS.
Yes, this is a common strategy for larger companies.
THEN, they see what gets broken by the new OS and work from there.
Umm... but don't you think there's plenty of corporate goodwill to be garnered
if *your* package is *not* on the list of, "Things that break with Vista" by
that point? From what you're saying, I'm guessing that Vista will probably
have been out at least a year before ORCAD begins to work on it?
It's one thing if you're just a garage shop or some individual with a software
package that you sell for peanuts and the software can be considered, "as is"
with no expectations of upgrades or bug fixes or future OS compatibility
changes over time. But for what Cadence charges for ORCAD, they're clearly
not in this same league, and it's reasonable for people to expect a lot more.
Of course, that still doesn't stop MS from then breaking the software AGAIN
with a new service pack. I mean, after all, if all your MSF routines
automatically register themselves, and then the OS starts blocking the
registry, how could that be MS's fault!
By MSF do you mean... Microsoft Framework? Or something else?
---Joel
P.S. -- Another thing that makes ORCAD 15.7 look like something from a garage
shop software company is the NEARLY 100!!! exceptions that it sticks in the
Windows Firewall "exceptions" list. Sheesh! You can't tell me that's REALLY
needed and not just some ultra-lazy programmer's implementation of a
"workaround," can you?
