[dunham]

Microsoft is not my favorite company, but one thing that has stood out to me is that they really value backwards compatibility in general.

I see Microsoft bending over backwards to support old third party apps that rely on API bugs or ancient versions of windows. On the Apple side, I see 32-bit apps being cut off, Pages not supporting old versions of Pages files, etc. To me this reads as not caring much about backwards compatibility.

[actionfromafar]

Microsoft is very committed to support apps compatible with Windows versions from 1995 to about … 2007 or so.

[dunham]

I see. Coincidentally, my experience with windows mostly falls into that range of dates. (Actually goes back to the 80's, and ends around 2003.)

[actionfromafar]

I’m not entirely sure where the cutoff date is. But my general point is that Microsoft started churning lots of dev stacks which aren’t easy to install or deploy on their newest Windows versions, all the while a random Win32 program from 1999 works just fine.