Comment by mschuster91
20 hours ago
> and marks a clear regression in Microsoft's attitudes toward backwards compatibility.
Yeah... but for what purpose should it have been kept? Anyone with a legitimate need to run 16 bit software on a modern Windows machine can always go for virtualization or emulation. The effort required in supporting that technology is far from zero, and old code to work with legacy stuff - no matter in which project - is always a fruitful source of security exploits.
My observation is the "old Microsoft" would have kept it in and supported it because that's how they rolled. The lack of NTVDM in x64 Windows signaled a change that the commitment to compatibility is now on shaky ground.
Whether it should have been kept for a technical reason is secondary, in my mind, to eroding the confidence their Customers had that old software would continue to work.
The market doesn't seem to give a damn so I guess they made the right call.