Lightroom 4 and Leaving The Past Behind
Yesterday I was in Cincinnati, Ohio teaching a mini-version of my “Light it, Shoot it, Retouch it” workshop at the ProPhoto Expo (a really excellent event by the way, put together with the help and vision of none other than David Ziser himself), and during one of the breaks between sessions a very nice woman came up and told me how upset she was that Lightroom 4 wouldn’t run on Windows XP, and that she feared when Photoshop CS6 ships it won’t support XP either.
Here’s basically what I told her: It’s 2012. Windows XP came out in October of 2001 (more than 10 years ago—see the press release from Microsoft’s site above). It’s time to freakin’ upgrade! Then she said “But XP doesn’t have any bugs!” That alone was a sad statement — not for her, but for Microsoft as a company, and that she is so afraid of the problems that upgrading to a newer version of Windows will bring her, that she is mentally stuck using an OS from 11 years ago (but that’s an entirely different subject for another day).
Do you know how long 11 years is in technology terms?
This it what 2001 technology looks like and this is what we were using back then (below):
I doubt she’s still shooting a Nikon Coolpix 995, or using an old Nokia cell phone (that one shown above was the bestselling cell phone of 2001), or that she has a white antique iPod the size of a toaster, but yet….she’s still running Windows XP.
Microsoft doesn’t even support XP any more
So why do we think Adobe would or even should? I know there are pockets of people out there who are upset that Lightroom 4 won’t run on XP (when I did my last post about Lightroom 4, I heard from a number of them), just like I’m sure it’s very hard to find replacement parts for that DVIX player that someone still is using out there, but at some point these folks are going to have to leave the past behind, and upgrade their computer and OS, or they are literally going to be left behind by technology like Lightroom 4.
I would imagine that the woman I talked to has gotten more than her money’s worth out of her investment in Windows XP and a computer still old enough to run it, but at some point it’s decision time, and if I were her I wouldn’t wait another day. For everybody else still clinging to 2001 technology —- it’s time to freakin’ upgrade (and it’s time to upgrade that Nintendo Game Boy Color while you’re at it, too!):-)