How Microsoft Lost the API War (2004)

This is in reference to the link that showed the hardcoded references to Windows 9 (https://searchcode.com/?q=if%28version%2Cstartswith%28%22windows+9%22%29)

There is a wonderful 10-year old post written by Joel Spolsky that describes the virtues of Microsoft in that matter:

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

It's pretty long, but you may want to focus on the paragraph "The Two Forces at Microsoft" which talks about the amazing stories like the Sim City story and explains why such hard-coded references were common.