In 2006.

https://www.amazon.com/Old-New-Thing-Development-Throughout/...

Most of these stories came in the form of blog posts by Raymond Chen in his blog The Old New Thing. It used to be even more fun to read in its old form and layout, and I am fairly sure not all his posts survived the move to the modern "devblogs" platform. But many of his posts were published as a book by the same name. Highly recommended, and a great gift!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

https://www.amazon.com/Old-New-Thing-Development-Throughout/...

Fairly widely read also by Joel on this topic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... (not the article cited on Twitter; links to Chen's posts sadly broken)

Sharing because it might give you some Windows history at MS

https://www.amazon.com/Old-New-Thing-Development-Throughout/...

Also read - Showstopper

My understanding is that Raymond Chen ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ ) was a huge part of ensuring that everything was backwards compatible. If you like that kind of thing, he's got a book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Old-New-Thing-Development/dp/03214...

     which meant you could develop for XP and still
     run on Vista and vice versa

That's not the case. A lot of apps and drivers broke on Vista.

You should really go and read The Old New Thing, as it's really enlightening: http://amzn.to/wW0Okn