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> ... that it works as well as it does given all the backwards compatibility kludges I like to joke that Microsoft put the "backwards" in backwards compatibili

> ... that it works as well as it does given all the backwards compatibility kludges I like to joke that Microsoft put the "backwards" in backwards compatibility, but they really do. Remember that historically software was sold as a product, and not a service, including operating systems. If you had a bunch of software that worked, and upgraded from Windows N to Windows N+1 and some of the software no longer worked, you would naturally blame Windows and not upgrade. Consequently Microsoft had to maintain good backwards compatibility, and they did a pretty good job of it over the years. Remember that in some cases people don't have the source code for programs, or the tools that could build it. Microsoft preserves that.

therein 8y ago
> Remember that in some cases people don't have the source code for programs, or the tools that could build it. Microsoft preserves that. And even if they failed to preserve the source code or the toolchain for whatever reason, they go to extreme lengths to get fixes in: https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-patch-their.html https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-...
stephengillie 8y ago
> and they did a pretty good job of it over the years. It's impressive how many traditional desktop programs continue to work in Windows 10. Sadly, a lot of games no longer work, and are dependent on having a solid community to re-port the game. One example is Starsiege:Tribes, whose community is still active: http://www.playt1.com/ http://www.playt1.com/
int0x80 8y ago
Small nit: a service is a product.