[Someone1234]

> Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s

Not sure what this is a reference to. Microsoft STILL supports running VB6/COM/C++/etc from the 1990s today. Only Visual J++ disappeared, but a court of law required that. I'd go so far as to claim that their success is in no small part because their backwards compatibility game is top notch.

IE6 was a nightmare, but that wasn't "pulling the rug" rather just being lazy and not developing the browser at all (because it competed with their proprietary platform -- Win32). Once Microsoft deploys something and developers start using it, typically they support it "forever" (even IE compatibility modes remain to support IE5/6 code).

[tracker1]

While I really appreciate their efforts on backwards compatibility support, they also have/had a horrible track record of supporting anything outside windows for more than 2 versions then dropping it entirely.