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I really don't care about this, why should we expect MS to support their 20 years old software? Back in '95 internet was not that common so it was nice to have such time wasters built into the OS.

On the other hand, including Minecraft would be a really interesting decision.



Solitaire and Minesweeper were actually there to help users get used to using a mouse (Minesweeper was about click and Solitaire was about drag-and-drop). They became dedicated time-wasters later, but they did actually serve a purpose at one time.


Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs. Read Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog for some anecdotes about the amazing lengths they would go internally to keep old software working. Like with the classic game Sim City they realized its code was buggy and using uninitialized memory, so the Windows team wrote a special case to detect when Sim City runs and emulate an older compatible memory allocator. It's not really clear if MS today cares about supporting software like they used to.


>> "Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs."

That's a reputation they need to lose. It was important at one time but has been holding them back for years.


Just like the start menu was holding them back and had to be removed in Windows 8...


The start menu isn't old software/API's.




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