DaveHull wrote:
One of our Gold partners' company provides an SDK for their hardware
product. The SDK is compiled with VC 6.0 and they are looking to move
to a more recent compiler. They are concerned that their customers
which rely on our SDK will find that the new version of the SDK,
compiled with Visual Studio 2003/2005, no longer works with their
application. They cannot control which compilers customers use to
build their applications. Can someone provide guidance regarding how
they should move forward and minimize the affect on customer base?
I've seen two ways. One is to switch to the new compiler and stop
supporting the old. It's rather radical, but such is life. People
should not force you to drag your feet, but instead should move on to
keep up with you. Others have been moving on to new compilers; and
I have seen it happen, because the APIs/SDKs had moved as well, or
dispite APIs'/SDKs' lagging behind. If you don't drive the market,
the market drives you. What might happen is that potential customers
discover that you are still on the 9-year old compiler, and they just
don't want to talk to you, and instead switch to your competitor (if
any) or try finding some other solution. You lose potential customers
that way. You also lose those who do want to move on, but you don't
give them the opportunity. So, instead of having your SDK as a huge
anchor on their necks, they break free by finding other ways to solve
their problems, while moving on to new compilers.
The other approach is to support both. That usually is more expensive
from the resource point of view. If you can, do that, which means that
your customers have the freedom while you incur extra cost. Supporting
two or more compilers is not necessarily twice as hard to develop.
However, it ususally means you not only need more developers, you also
need more support staff, more tech writers, more QA. And good support
staff and QA for a library/SDK development are usually hard to find.
In any case do your P&L -- is it worth spending extra effort? How much
do you gain/retain if you still provide VC6 versus how much of your R&D
time is going to be taken away from doing VC7 or VC8 development?
V
compiler you use. Of course, if the interface invloves library objects