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Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

it seems like that on a long enough timeline however, promising that legacy cruft will always keep crufting as it did before seems like a huge burden that leaks into your ability to deliver quality in your current offerings.

Sure there are old things that are good and "complete" but far more old stuff is just old and could well be burnt to the ground, except for the fact that you have some customer somewhere relying on its oddities and unintended behaviors as an essential feature of their integrations.

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I feel you are arguing for real harm now, versus potential harm in the future.

There's no sign that being very-backward-compatible is holding Windows back that I can see.

In the other hand I have collected a set of utilities into my work-flow that are easily 20+ years old, and they all work fine.

The last major cull from Microsoft was that 16bit programs ceased to work on 64 bit platforms. Other than that I've never had an app fail.

Most of those utility supplies have long since disappeared, retired, or died. But I can still keep transferring those apps to the next machine and they keep running.

None of this impacts the quality of my current offerings. Ultimately all this costs me is some cheap disk space.

I have a couple camera apps from the mid 'aughts that were written for Windows XP that still function fine under Windows 10. Same thing with an old photo scanner, that just only recently failed. My last SCSI dependent peripheral. Ran fine on Windows 10, on ancient software, using ancient TWAIN SCSI drivers, until the scanner itself failed. As I moved from XP -> 7 -> 8.1 -> 10, the first thing I did was load up all my old photo software to be sure it would work.

My father has an ancient scanner from the XP era and the only thing that still works with it is a Windows XP VM he happens to have (I assume later windows could work too, but the XP exists for other reasons and so we continue to connect the scanner to it).

Maybe Linux could be beaten to work with it, but this works well enough.

Microsoft struggles to release new OS’s, move to new devices and it’s been trying to move to ARM and has seen little success.

Backwards compatibility is very much holding MS back

Windows ARM64 works great, with (similar to macOS) transparent support for x64 programs. Successful or not, I don't see any problem with the software.

Works great as long as you don’t care about the lack of performance, not getting great battery life, and the lack of native applications…

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