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Comment by desigooner | Hacker News Reader

I get a chuckle out of reading people's views w.r.t. Microsoft. There are a good number who complain about lack of innovation & how Microsoft invests too much time in supporting legacy systems and that they should totally get rid of the CE core. Then there's the other end of the spectrum where Microsoft is stupid to stop supporting certain platforms because they're clearly not thinking about the users who use those systems.

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Joel Spolsky famously wrote about those competing imperatives in a 2004 essay on the API war:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp."

The former is obsessed with backwards compatibility, and the latter is obsessed with the Next New Thing. Spolsky's thesis was that the latter won out, to Microsoft's long-term detriment.

Spolsky worked at Microsoft years ago. Not sure how relevant and current his knowledge is...

He wrote that piece in 2004, though.

Well that explains why Raymond Chen's blog is called The Old New Thing.

That's funny - my hatred of Windows almost entirely boils down to their reluctance to chuck old and horrible APIs (see windows.h). I'm not sure how much this is true anymore.

I think this is inevitable when a company targets a diverse set of demographics. What works for one customer might be disastrous for another.

People would damn MS either way. They could've updated older WP7 devices only to have them run slow and have newer apps not work correctly due to missing hardware features. As a developer, that'd be nightmare to support.

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