While Windows Vista’s launch was infamous for breaking support in a vast swath of applications, Windows 7 will not repeat this situation and may even improve on Vista’s compatibility.
Microsoft has pledged to improve compatibility by “rescuing” applications that simply didn’t work on Vista:
Along with the core tenet of ensuring that any application that worked on Windows Vista also work on Windows 7 we have a stretch goal to “raise the bar” and make applications work on Windows 7 that never worked on Windows Vista. For Windows 7, we have some good news early in the development cycle. So far we have made over 30 applications that were “broken” on Vista work on Windows 7. This means that Windows 7 will have higher application compatibility than Windows Vista. We are continuing to push this number up. Below is a table of the # of applications by language that we have made to work on Windows 7 but didn’t’ work on Vista.
While the blog post outlines a list of non-English applications, this can only bode well for major applications that were borked by Vista’s launch.
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