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Microsoft got where they did by prioritising extreme backward compatibility, hence the SimCity on Windows 95 story - SimCity has a bug, Windows 95 specifically works around the bug so now SimCity works on Windows 95. For ordinary end user software this is unabiguously good news, for a compiler it's more of a mixed bag.

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The ADK used a lookup db to apply those fixes though; it wasn't a global fudge. Windows compatibility has probably been the main differentiator over the decades and every break (vista driver signing, dropping support for a bunch of scanners/printers, os quality issues) then 10 and even more so 11 making upgrading a mess of seemingly huge hardware replacement costs for next to no user/use gains, has caused uproar. Hell even xp was a mess; windows compatibility mode barely did what it suggested; but the intention was there.

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