Their attempt to modernise their phone platform involved several rounds of effectively throwing away the existing library of developed software. If anything, that shows the value of backwards compatibility.
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.
Google supposedly didn't support windows phone, in part, because they were upset that they couldn't use the wince apps as a base.
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.
> Trust me, no one wanted to use WinCE for anything.
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.
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.