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669 points danso | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Hokusai ◴[] No.23262161[source]
> Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs.

This is the key part. Many in the software industry still believes that the start-up mindset of break things move fast applies to us. The economy depends on software, governments depend on software, education depends on software, lives depend on software ... but we treat software as a toy where a new fancy image format is a reasonable change to make because our platform gets a little more fancy and for sure a little less compatible to lock-in users.

I am all for regulation, and it is coming, as the software industry has shown to be an immature risk-taking mess. But, it can be a more bearable amount of regulation if we exercise some level of self-constraint on how we break each new release of software.

If we keep blaming traditional business (education, accounting, grocery stores, etc.) for not "updating fast enough" to new trends, they are going to justly react to our demands on their thin margin profits and ask the government to stop us. When you do not know if your business will survive another month, to have to invest non-stop in new software without any tangible benefit is an unreasonable demand.

Software has become too important the past twenty years. It is time that as a industry we realize that and act accordingly.

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jp555 ◴[] No.23262214[source]
You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better?

I don't put as much faith in that as you.

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1. mywittyname ◴[] No.23262850[source]
I'm not sure where you got that impression. I think the parent was saying that software is extremely crucial now, and technology companies can't continue this trend of randomly breaking traditions for the sake of moving forward.

Software is critical to the function of society. And society can't afford to keep up with the rate of emerging technological trends, it's just not possible. Technology companies have to continue to support interoperability with the lowest common denominator systems.

This is significantly worse than Apple ending Flash support. At least that was announced well ahead of time and was major, major news. This migration to a new default image format is a blindsiding. Three years is not really an appropriate time window for such a transition.

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2. Hokusai ◴[] No.23262984[source]
> Software is critical to the function of society. And society can't afford to keep up with the rate of emerging technological trends, it's just not possible.

You expressed it better than myself. :)