The blame still falls on MS as it is the MS decision that the vendors
are responding to. MS have changed their file management system four or five times, the vendors can either put in a lot of effort to write amendments to allow their applications written for earlier variants of Windows, or decide to leave them be. The decision is based on the likely returns from the effort expended.
At the time of release, MS claimed that the switch to NTFS was the best file system they would ever have, and anyone could ever have, now they've changed it. They could easily write a file conversion program, but they choose not to. The application vendors won't get enough return on the effort to justify rewriting their earlier versions to run on the new file system in Vista.
MS chose to make the change and forced this on anyone wishing to use Vista, so again MS are forcing the non-compatibility issue. I can see a lot of people staying with older OSs as they aren't yet ready to fork out all the money needed to change all their applications.
Anyone know what great leap forward the new file system is supposed to provide?
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One good thing about Unix and Linux, is the uniformity of basic structure and adherence to published industry standards (something MS don't do) means that a hardware driver or application written for one version of Linux will run on later versions of that variant, so something written for Red Hat 6 back in the mid 1990s will run on the latest versions of Mandrake, Mandriva, etc. The only possible hiccup in this would be running a 32 bit application or driver on a 64 bit system, that may require something extra.
