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Product to Product Compatibility

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by cleg

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We have a product that is tightly integrated with MS Office (Excel in particular). The vendor of this product stated that it will take 3-4 months to provide a compatible version of the product after the new MS Office (XP) is released.

Question: Is this lag in release time reasonable? What is a reasonable time for a vendor to provide a compatible product? With an OS release, I would hope all major vendors would be ready on or near release date, but does/should this same requirement apply to integrated products?

Said another way, are the compatibility expections the same for the Product to Product relationship as they are to the OS to Product releationship?

Any comments would be appreciated.

6 replies

by md_hashim

XP being an MS product we've all learned to put up with such delays - especially now.
XP took a long time in beta tests and no 1 was sure where it was headed for quite some time. MS speeded up release and caught vendors of related products on the wrong foot - who is to blame?

by wayne m.

I think a 3-4 month lag is very reasonable, especially for a vendor that does thorough compatibility testing of the new version.

Microsoft performs a tremendous amount of churn in their system and utility API (application program interface or "operating system function") calls. A good vendor will have to test compatibility not only with the current version of the the application suite, but also backward compatibility testing with previous versions. Finally, many vendors are usually hard at work at enhancing their own products, and do not have time scheduled to upgrade to new releases until after the release is publicly available and stable.

I would be very happy with a vendor who provided a solid release only 3-4 months after therelease of the newest Office suite.

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