Rough guess but this is all content farming of Raymond Chen posts at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ though I can't find a smoking gun. I definitely remember an article about Intuit doing something some dumb they had to keep an internal API around reporting the wrong value or something like that.

  Buy up one copy of every software package available at Egghead Software and have your team test it and file bugs.

We know a lot of this from the Windows NT leaks, its a shame that clearly Windows was a drastically better maintained OS than today. In the NT leaks there were comments about things like adding support for things like Delphi to ensure it compiles.

From an article on this[0]:

> On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

The article’s content is generally quite weak, could probably have been covered in an old school tweet with screenshots and nothing of value would have been lost.

The only positive thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be written by AI.

I don’t think this person truly understands what they’re writing about, they did a little research, made some screenshots and put enough words in the article so that it will show up in search engines.

It’s reminiscent to me of many articles on Windows error codes, almost all of them are basically generic, generally quite long with drivel, and steering you to install some “fix it” software. Any technical person coming across these just finds them annoying as they clearly gamed the search results with unhelpful content.

I have read some similar things about macOS having app-specific fixes for popular apps.

It might have been this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034413

I worked for this place that made a security auditing tool. The agent had to know which version of Windows it was running on. When Microsoft came out with a new version, the agent didn't know what it was running on, since it hadn't been updated to include that version. I forget what it did in response, but it didn't run right - maybe just terminated?

Microsoft discovered this in their testing, before they released the new Windows version. In response, they added our agent to a list of programs that Windows would lie to about the Windows version. If our program asked, we would be told the previous version.

Well, that was great, in that our program didn't terminate early (or whatever it did). But now, even after we updated our agent, it still wouldn't know whether it was running on the new version of Windows, and so would not audit it correctly!

This dance shows just how far Microsoft went with backward compatibility. We were not a top-1000-most-used program by any means, but they knew about us and tested us and fixed for us. (I mean, we didn't want it, in this case, but it was still impressive.)

Didn't they also make sure Lotus 123 didn't run as well as it could have?