But it isnt just Microsoft that has done it. Firefox is the same exact way. There are many sites that work in Firefox 2 but because Firefox 3 is now Acid2 Compliant those sites do not render correctly in Firefox 3 now. With the release of Firefox 3.1 they plan on stopping support for Firefox 2.
So in reailyt Firefox is worse cause they wont even support their older version yet Microsoft will. It is not wrong of Microsoft or anyone to try and force people to upgrade. They is why they release upgrades.
The open source community is even worse then Microsoft yet M$ gets the lashings all teh time. With any open source software if they fin dout you are using a outdated version the first words you hear them say is update then we can help.
So why is M$ bad cause they want their users to be up to date with the latest software and security? EVERYONE does it. OS X, Linux all of them do it. But only Microsoft gets the lashing and the bad name cause of it. Now why is that?
Seriously. Just look at this example. I was using Ubuntu 7.10 and tried to get help from their community. The very first thing that was said to me was to update to 8.04 before they would even consider trying to help. They wouldnt support their own product. Not until they forced me to upgrade. At that time it was running Firefox 3 Beta as its main browser which has flaws in it. But yet had to run it to get help.
So i dont see why everyone is sour at Microsoft for actually being the most forgiving when it comes to old software. They still support IE6, they are supporting XP till 2014. Show me 1 open source OS that will have support till that day with its current versions.
Plus this doesnt take into the effect the amount of extra coding that a site needs to have in order to kep it IE6 compatible. If sites were able to make their site pass some of hte web standards that should be implemented then we wouldnt have the coded mess on some sites that we see now.
But what do i know. I am defending Micrsofot from Ubuntu.