The "binary abandonment" model can have effectively the same result, though. An example that come to mind immediately is how much of a mess it is to get games

The "binary abandonment" model can have effectively the same result, though. An example that come to mind immediately is how much of a mess it is to get games that were built with Games for Windows Live like the PC port of Fable 3 running on modern Windows. It's possible, but there's a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through, none of which would be necessary if Microsoft shipped a quick and dirty update that pulled out the Games for Windows Live dependency.