That was a thing until VS2015, as far as I can tell; the older versions let you install all minor releases in parallel. And many Windows developers choose to r

That was a thing until VS2015, as far as I can tell; the older versions let you install all minor releases in parallel. And many Windows developers choose to rather install the specific minor version they used globally, instead of just vendoring it in the program folder (even though the license allows it, hence "redistributable"). Right now my machine has no less than 4 versions of the 2008 redist installed globally, for each x86 and x64.