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>And old software works on Windows pretty well. Rather, Apple and Google don’t value backwards compatibility that much.

You have it backwards: Microsoft values backwards compatibility in Windows so much it's eccentric.

Game consoles are a hit or miss whether they implement any form of backwards compatibility with previous hardware, and the concept of backwards compatibility in the world of personal computing in anything other than Windows flat out does not exist.

We (as in common and power users) are very, very fortunate Microsoft cares about Windows backwards compatibility so much, but by no means is such an attitude the industry norm. The industry norm is: Code fast and break shit, maybe fix later.



Microsoft has often also been held back on improving APIs because they are so committed to backward compat.




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