Even that was done in a completely different way from the old DX redists, the last of which was released in 2004.

MS abandoned the old DX redists after 9.0c released in Aug 2004.

Thank you. I still remember the developer preview from late 2011.

OOXML and the FAT/exFAT patents are some of them. There is this HN comment thread BTW: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

I think there is the free Word Viewer, and it existed even back in 2000.

I think Win8.1's start button helps here. In fact, Win8.0 release that had no start button did not have this option either in the right-click menu. I personally used Ctrl-Alt-Del most often.

That being said, I do think Vic Gundotra should probably be fired from Google.

Why do they want to target Google? What are the practical problems caused by the data collection?

Two years happens to be how long MS continues support for a previous service pack after a new service pack release. And they do not fix the renderer directly, rather they use https://code.google.com/p/ots/ which validates the fonts before passing them to the kernel.

Yea, what is funny is that nobody seems to pay much attention to Office 2003 end of support even though privilege escalation bugs are not usable without another exploit that executed code in the application in the first place.

What is funny is that MS had a Java Virtual Machine in the late 1990s that was infamous for its extensions that led to a Sun lawsuit which eventually led to it being discontinued.

Remember that this feature was released back in 2001. To put it in context, it was just after the infamous export restrictions on strong cryptography was lifted.

VS2012 never required IE10 and can do Metro apps. But yea, they had to change the VS2013 setup right after RTM to turn the IE10 check into a warning and later release an update that has additional fixes

Personally, as I said before I consider it a workaround not a solution.