Age of Empires III scenario rehash? (Score 1)

For those who didn't already know, Microsoft has already used this tactic before in their quest to heard gamers onto their latest and greatest operating system. Only last time, it was a pathetically transparent attempt at forcing a targetted user base (one that Microsoft likely considers to be power users... at least moreso than non-gamers) to Windows XP. I think it may very well be important to look back and consider what happened in this instance if we are to look forward to see what type of tactics Microsoft is planning on using to accomplish this: The day before Age of Empires III came out I got a *ahem* preview copy of it from Bit Torrent. Alas, being the Windows 2000 Professional user that I am, I was surprised to learn upon loading the image of the first disc into my virtual drive and running setup.exe that the game only runs on Windows XP! "Wait a minute, that can't be right, we're talking about practically the same operating system with some UI updates and minor kernel tweaks", I thought. There was no logical reason for this game NOT to be able to run on Windows XP, and right off the bat I knew that. The question then became precisely what was needed to be done to get around this, if in fact there was anything. I was initially scared that they had added code into the main game executable so that it wouldn't be able to run on Windows 2000. The only problem was that I had no way of telling without actually INSTALLLING the game and running it for myself. Google was consulted, and answers were found. All that was necessary was to run setup.exe using the command line with a "/n" switch to make it think it was a network install rather than a local installation on a Windows 2000 machine. Bingo. The game installed and ran without a hitch. Weellll, I'll be! This was an extremely blatant and shameful move on Microsoft's part in order to force users into upgrading to Windows XP when there is obviously no need. The barrier was artificial and the result of an unnecessary marketing decision. Like I said, this case is very important to keep in mind as we hear news of the "Vista-only" Halo 2 release. Who knows, maybe the game itself will simply not run on previous versions of Windows due to some unknown technical barrier in how is runs? But there's a very large chance that a simple OS version check will be employed which, whether it exists only in the setup program or also in the main game executable, will likely be easily bypassed. In the end, not enough is known right now about the differences in Vista's core architecture to that of XP, but it will be interesting to see how easily Halo 2 will be to run on Windows XP and 2000 machines.