[undees]

As a (mild) counterpoint, I've worked in Win16 code bases that were a nightmare to port to Win32, Win32 code bases that had to be half rewritten to run under the Win32-like API of WinCE, Visual Studio upgrades that broke swaths of MFC/ATL/STL code, and so on. As an end user, I've run apps that were designed for Win95 that choked under NT4, XP that choked under Vista, and so on.

I'm in awe of the backward-compatibility efforts that Raymond Chen and crew have put forth and explained in their blogs. No doubt things could be much worse. But I'm still tired of fighting Windows APIs, both as a developer and as an end user.