[meaty]

Are you serious?

I wrote an x86 NT utility back in 1996 on NT4 (with no service packs). It still executes and works perfectly on an x64 Windows 8 machine.

That's a mere 17 years ago.

There are two APIs now. The old one isn't going away either.

[AnthonyMouse]

I don't think the OP was talking about breaking backward compatibility with Win32. More like releasing a version of "Java" that produced bytecode that wouldn't run on anything but Microsoft's virtual machine. Or just the general and continuing behavior of Microsoft's developer tools to produce and encourage developers to write software that only runs or runs properly on Windows.

[meaty]

Well what do you expect them to do?

I think they would be batshit insane to do otherwise.