Problem is that backward compatibility isn't cheap and at some point can require so many exceptions upon exceptions that the chance for bugs increases.
So eventually the decision gets made to stop doing it.
Indeed, but you'd think with all that money pouring in, with them having a monopoly on the market and
ever expanding, they'd have enough money and resources to keep maintaining it! Ultimately, it comes down to an executive decision, and they chose *not* to support older games, and not to work for quality. This is why Windows 10 makes for a poor gaming operating system if you're fond of the older classics. And why I was trying to (unsuccessfully) persuade people *not* to free-upgrade to Windows 10. Eventually, when they saw it was catching, Microsoft forced us all to buy Windows 10 pre-installed with new computers.
Apple's new Mac OS implementation/philosophy is *way* worse -- so I won't even go there...
Even Linux, with many of its distros, seems to going in this fast-moving direction and making developers work thrice as hard to up-keep. GNOME 3 is one such notoriously merciless project.
So the moral of the story is, keep your old copy of windows just in case.
Absolutely. This is why I'm still running Windows 8.1 on my dedicated gaming machine, and why I still keep a copy of Windows XP (for my really old, Windows-only games) in VirtualBox.
The problem is you cannot run an older copy of Windows on a much newer machine because Microsoft and its partners stop producing drivers for that copy of Windows with the newer hardware. So you basically have to do what they tell you, what they dictate and force on you.
This is why, despite loving computers since childhood, I'm beginning to hate them -- because of current industry practices.
Computer used to mean freedom -- the possibility to do things never conceived before. Now they are becoming just closed and limited tools used to sell stuff and consume in waves.