>>34 That's disingenuous.

It looks more like this:

Microsoft is untrustworthy and quite possibly evil. When they have a monopoly, they write unsafe code and try and blame the user. When they don't have a monopoly, they try and reengineer words like "safe" to recover it.

Microsoft Safety I can do without.

> why exactly would they want to kill all that off?

Because the Microsoft Developer Lock-In strategy works best when developers are investing in Windows. Once they're already invested, they might broaden their horizons, but while they're actively putting effort into learning new technologies from Microsoft, they're not doing anything else.

Windows code that ran in 3.1 doesn't run anymore. Windows code that run on Windows95 doesn't run anymore. I have TV cards whose drivers were Windows98-only and will not run on Windows anymore. Windows NT4 has many programs that don't work anymore.

Not only has Microsoft "done this before", they do it with every release. Except maybe Windows ME. I'm not aware of any significant breakage there.