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Comment by Lapsa | Hacker News Reader

that's one thing I genuinely admire Microsoft for - the effort they put into maintenance

It's not Microsoft as a whole though: the OS team goes above and beyond in maintenance, Office team did nothing of that, Azure team doesn't seem to be keen on that either.

I somewhat agree, but even that is only for capitalistic reasons.

If they didn't have the massive backwards compatibility, corporate users would essentially be free to choose a new OS platform every few years. By maintaining deep legacy software support, they make it easy for their customers to stay addicted to Windows.

MS is not doing this for your benefit, or out of some kind of dedication, it's pure capitalism.

Sure, but I think this is an example of markets working well. Customers don’t want to have to adapt to a new platform every year and are willing to pay for that service. Microsoft recognizes that desire and provides backward compatibility. Microsoft charges a price above what it costs to provide the service but below what their customers are willing to pay. Both parties win. Seems like a good thing.

Rarely have I seen "both parties win" used in describing dealing with Microsoft.

There is tons of documented history of their anti-competitive behavior and deceptive practices. It is not very often that a CEO of a company in a market that is "working well" is called to testify in front of Congress.

You seem to have changed the topic. As the previous poster was saying, them doing this particular thing for money is not bad. It's good. The fact that you're for some reason pulling in unrelated things that Microsoft has done presumably means you agree, but it's a mystery as to why you don't want to say so.

> even that is only for capitalistic reasons

That's a good thing. People wanting to pay for your stuff is a good sign that it's valuable to them, and thus worth doing.

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