That's true, but when MS decided to make all versions of windows backward compatible, I think they were thinking more about companies than the home user. Companies are the ones who really need to be able run their programs on their machines, sometimes really old programs that no longer have support or alternatives they can choose from.

If you have to run ancient applications that no longer have support, then you deserve to run ancient applications that no longer have support ;-)

You should always have an exit strategy.

But running an emulated Windows environment is not the worst possible scenario.

These ancient, unsupported apps aren't things like spread sheets and word processors, they're industry specific applications. They're much more expensive to create and update (and buy) because of limited demand, and there's often little choice in what software a company can use.

I've been working on a project to upgrade a old DOS based industry specific app to a "modern" browser app. There are still people using the DOS based version, and our main client for the browser app is still using Windows 2000 and IE 6.

I have suffered a similar fate. Back in 1998 I had to translate the shipping cost calculation of a huge brick-and-mortar store in Brazil written in FoxPro - it was the _only_ documentation on how to calculate it they had and finally I gave up on understanding it and made a line-by-line translation for their web store.

It ran for about five years, until the company went bankrupt.