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.

It is sad that Jonathan Schwartz of Sun had problems too, as they were the one that pushed SEC to allow blogging material information for example.

FYI, I actually suggested it to kurtsh of MS using twitter and this is the response:
https://twitter.com/kurtsh/status/365353602195275777

They later backed off and clarified this rule, as I remembered.

It still shows the product was fundamentally flawed.

Yeah, this reminds me of the MS-Novell deal, which was done in a similar way and has similar problems.

The big difference is that Larry Page is still running that company, though this does reminds me of Vic Gundotra.

On a true 486 yes. All that XP requires to run however is the CMPXCHG8B instruction which Vortex86 implemented probably years ago.

What about a MBA without the cost-cutting part? I think Meg Whitman right now is trying to fix HP.

I think the quote from the article directly should be enough of a warning.

Well the deceptive part IMO is the "bait and switch" part where they showed one filename but in reality download a different file.

Unless you are using Office or Lync which have their own copy of GDI+. Office 2010 only uses their own copy when running under XP though unlike older versions and 2013 don't support XP at all so they don't have their own copy anymore.

In fact, MS was the one who released the first OS/2 2.0 SDKs to developers in the first place. I wrote a blog article relating to what happened to the project: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html