See, I have one problem with the "programmers need to make their games compatible with Vista" point. Which came first? The program, or the Vista?
Going forward, yes I can see that anyone who publishes something now needs to make it Vista compatible. But I put the blame for any program incompatibilities squarely on the shoulders of MS for things that were released prior to Vista. Just like what coders need to make their program Vista compatible exist for free now, MS developers obviously had what was required to make a program XP (or earlier) Vista compatible.
For example, there is a HUGE list of educational software that I'd love to be able to use for my youngest son now. I bought it all legally when my oldest was his age (6 year age difference). But because the OS's changed so much, each time by MS, in that time, none of it works. And most of the companies that made it are now either out of business, bought out by someone else, or making other types of software. It's a rather cyclical problem, actually. Such software makers are finding that the market for edu-tainment is shrinking, so they stop bothering to update programs, so the market shrinks more. On the flip side of this coin, anything that we'd bought for the Mac way back then still works just fine on my kid's Mac mini. New OS's for the Mac (though we haven't upgraded anything to Leopard), didn't cause everything we owned to be unusable. So I'm left wondering why MS can't figure out how to release a new OS that allows for backward compatibility. To me, the burden is on them because they came second.
And, just for the record, yeah, I really don't like MS's general corporate policies. Not a MS hater because there's not nearly enough passion behind my feelings them to call it hate, just think they need to step down from their self created pedestal and look at what other people are doing right.
(And my apologies if this seems like a topic derail, it's not intended to be.)