Google supposedly didn't support windows phone, in part, because they were upset that they couldn't use the wince apps as a base.

IE's backwards compat method was to simply embed the old version of the engine, and use it as necessary. That's not really a factor in the many reasons people mostly use IE to download a better browser for personal browsing, but is a major factor in why it was the corporate browser of choice for decades: it is expected to be able to continue to work the same way on a long term basis.

Windows vs Linux usage rates on servers is mostly a statement of Linux is at least good enough, and a good enough solution with simpler (no) paid licensing is a clear win for ease of use. I haven't seen any Linux vs Windows server performance benchmarks in a long time; I'm assuming they're not that far apart, outside of whatever bits and pieces that either platform is truly bad at.

I was a WinCE developer - both .Net and MFC. Trust me, no one wanted to use WinCE for anything. Besides, MS abandoned WinCE with VS 2010.

I can’t speak for performance, but the resource requirements for Windows is huge compared to Linux and that really makes a difference in cloud environments when it comes to price (even excluding licensing cost) and startup time - that makes a difference when you need elasticity and to scale up and down fast.

You can do a lot with a 128MB/.25 vCPU Linux instance. You can barely get away with a 4GB RAM Windows instance with 1 vCPU.

Well, maybe nobody wanted to, but to support a new platform with unknown uptake, would you rather use your existing code, write something new on a less capable api[1], or just walk away?

[1] well, a lot of wince stuff was still there on wp7, if you were willing to do terrible things in order to get available features that weren't exposed.