Apple is actually worse in this regard, because a copy of Xcode from 2005 produces binaries that don't work at all on new Macs anymore. Windows 8 can at least run anything developed using Visual Studio 6 on Windows XP.
With free or 30 dollar major OS upgrades, upgrades that are consistently better than their predecessors (or at the very least (Lion?) not noticeably worse!), great and constant innovation to make the upgrades compelling and appealing, smooth/streamlined and automated "SP" deployments over the net, and many other things that I won't bother listing, they ensure that their users are, by and large, using the latest version of their OS.
They can break compatibility every time, for all I care. But when Windows 7 (or for all we know, Windows 8 too) provides no real enhancements over XP (at the very least, in the eyes of a consumer) except bloat and a confused interface, then and only then do I complain about how "evil" they are for (possibly purposely, if you look into the details of the hack I posted in another comment, you'll see why) breaking support for older operating systems.
Tell that to my G5 Mac Pro. :(
that's why apple won't find much traction in the business world. backwards compatibility is very important. You want to write software once, not have to continually update to migrate it to the latest OS
Sometimes it seems that the business world assumes that everything revolves around it.
The Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server licenses are what make the money. IIS is just included in all of them.
If they tried to charge money for IIS and shipped it for any other OS, it would fail pretty quick as it's not very sys admin friendly and most of it's performance is heavily dependent on Windows threading model.
Maybe they should rebrand VS 11 to "VS 11 Home."
By all appearances they don't care to be in that market, and for that very reason. So, the system works.
OS X is causing us so much trouble compared to other platforms. With XCode developer stuff, you can only target two versions of OS X, so that's 10.5&10.6, 10.6&10.7 and soon to be 10.7&10.8.
Some of our customers want Lion support. But a lot still want 10.5 support and most of them still want 10.6 support. There's no way of us providing this short of completely separate builds for OS X targeting different versions of the SDK.
And the "consistently better" part is a joke for certain things, e.g. OS X OpenGL support seems to be getting worse despite supporting a later version (3.2) to some degree.
Maybe things are better for more "consumer orientated" developers, but definitely for high-end stuff, it's getting to the point where it's getting more trouble than it's worth to develop for OS X.
I guess Apple cannot tell this directly but probably you should stop develop highly specialized software for OS X.
See also:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/vcgeneral/thre...
"Windows XP Embedded or Windows Embedded Standard 2009, both based on Windows XP Pro binaries will get security updates until Jan 8, 2019"
If 50% of all PCs run Windows XP as we speak, do you really consider it "ancient?" Do you think they will really stop delivering updates, even if they wish?
For most new app development, these users are not a very appealing target market -- if they don't buy computers nor upgrades, do they buy software either?
But I'm sure there are business cases where it makes sense to target such users (even GeoWorks and OS/2 are still around, after all, so there's someone interested in software that runs on 486 boxes).
Or they work for a corporation who can't upgrade to a decent OS because they invested heavily in IE6-only web applications which their business runs on.
Many of our customers (mainly large companies and government departments) have pathetic computers, never upgrade (and in fact downgrade any new computer purchased to XP) and buy the cheapest hardware you can imagine, yet spend huge amounts on software. I don't have any stats on hand, but at a guess I'd say at least 50% still use XP.
Or, they assemble computers from scratch and don't want to shell out extra cash for an upgrade, especially considering that Windows 7 is slower, has compatibility issues with older software and has made questionable "improvements" to UI.
The upgrade effort (never mind the expense) is huge, and there has to be a compelling case to move on from XP... which there certainly wasn't for Vista. Win 7 is gradually being adopted but it is taking a long time.
So while I can appreciate Microsoft's desire to move on from supporting apps on XP, it means that there is at least one large customer who won't be able to adopt VS11 for development.