I think Microsoft is worse about it that other commercial vendors. Perhaps due to a perception (not necessarily incorrect) on their part that their customers are locked in.
If a vendor who only supplies a single product decides to torpedo the APIs that you rely on, they create an easy opportunity for you to switch to another vendor entirely. Whereas historically Microsoft could wreak havoc upon an entire development platform (Visual Basic) knowing that probably all you'll be able to do about it is huff and puff around a bit on the Internet. After all you couldn't jump ship on Windows development - all your customers were Windows users, or your entire IT department was built around Windows, or your corporate intranet is all dependent on IE6, or whatever.
Funny you say that, because Microsoft's software problems are often attributed to bending over backwards to be backward compatible while other vendors like Apple quickly kills compatibility with almost ever release, with even point releases.
Take this game bundled with Windows 95. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe
It runs even on Windows 8. Upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7.
As I said in another comment, I still see some ASP and Visual Basic usage even after all these years, those applications are still supported in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Microsoft stopped making new versions because it wanted to move on to better technology. Want to take a poll on HN about what developers think of Visual Basic and Classic ASP? A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Right, but this is largely orthogonal to the problems with Metro on the desktop. Sandboxed Mac App Store apps are limited, but need not be written against an entirely new set of APIs that is not only unsupported by previous versions of the OS, but unsupported by non-App Store apps running on the current OS version. Say what you will about the Mac App Store, it at least doesn't suffer from all the problems inherent in the iOS App Store model. Metro does.
