InfoWorld: What's holding software back?: November 14, 2003: By Jon Udell: Applications

Backward compatibility hinders the evolution of software's primitive core

This is a nice article which reminds us that a lot of current problems can be traced back to backward compatibility with the software's primitive core(aka “lizard brain”). It also questions the progress we have made in twenty five years by comparing the features of Visicalc with Excel 2003.