this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Mostly because Microsoft tries to maintain backwards compatibility to ridiculous extents, and their customers grew accustomed to it so they kinda rely on it, no ?
I mean, they do until they don't. They eventually retired 16 bit subsystem, and they are gungho on TPM now. They have always had EOL dates for old OS's too. I'm not entirely sure why they do what they do, I suspect they are too large and unwieldy to operate as an entity with a unified vision.
Surely it's less work to maintain security patches for a few prior versions of windows than it is to indefinitely maintain backwards compatibility
Sure, and for home users the backwards compatibility feature only really comes up for people into retro-gaming, but a significant portion of their customer base is government agencies that haven't updated their software since the '90s. The old hardware is dying, so they need new stuff, and that means something with a new OS to run it, but it also needs to be able to run an ancient program that can only be replaced if some some seventy-something who calls every console a Nintendo can be made to understand why software older than their grandkids isn't the best thing to have, and they might need to introduce and pass a bill to get it done, not to mention budgeting to commission a company to code the replacement.