Lightroom 4 and Windows XP

I’ve seen quite a few comments about the fact that Lightroom 4 Beta doesn’t work with Windows XP (and you can probably guess that the full version isn’t going to work with it either). Last week Tom Hogarty (Lightroom Product Manager) wrote about the reasons behind that decision on his blog. Here’s a quick snippet but you can go here to read the rest:

“As many have noticed, the Lightroom 4 public beta we released last week does not support Windows XP. This decision did not come lightly and was based on a number of factors. With each version of Lightroom, our goal is always to provide a consistently excellent customer experience. Developing and testing across Operating System versions and platforms to ensure that we’re achieving this goal is a significant effort that takes time and resources. XP is substantially different from Windows Vista and Windows 7, and requires a independent testing matrix, which increases the complexity of our development efforts…”

I know it’s always hard to swallow something like this (well, if you’re an XP user that is), but here’s the thing… Microsoft barely support XP anymore. The Mainstream support phase for XP has passed. And it’s 10 years old. I hate to tell ya, but 10 years in technology might as well be 50. I think Adobe absolutely did the right thing here, so that they can indeed continue to provide a good experience for it’s users, and continually enhance Lightroom and push it in the directions it needs to go (and keep the price at a place that it needs to be).

(photo thumbnail courtesy of Fotolia.com)