They had some server-side issues at first, which were solved fast. And an update which was distributed through Windows Update was needed for the Store to show the 8.1 upgrade. Why? My guess is to promote the Store and to lead more people into checking it out. I don't see why this had to be an upgrade.

Also, they messed up the SkyDrive integration with 8.1, among other things. My guess is, there were a lot of rumours about how Sinofsky's Windows was the holy grail of the company from one side, and Office was the holy grail from another side. Now with the restructuring of the company and integrating everything as in their One Microsoft vision, one can hope that they'd use a unified style for everything.

8 and 8.1 have taught me to not care about operating systems as long as I can access and consume or create the content that I desire the way I desire. There is so much mess and inconsistencies in all OSes, that unless I work for a living on developing one, I rather not care about them at all.

Right click in the start button. ;)

I'd be surprised if windows 9 supports mouse control.


Hah.

Trolling aside, I don't see why people even think about such things. Of course it would support everything. Part of what they did in 8.1 is chance some of the input-related background stuff in order to standardise input types to use consistent APIs.

Mandatory Kinect use for the win.

"PC - load Word"
"PC - load WORD"
"PC - LOAD Word"
"PC - PLEASE LOAD Word"
"PC - Lo...ah, fuck it".

They should have a line of mobile OS thats separate from their product for desktops. Windows 8 is fine on a tablet.. and really awkward and annoying on anything else.

There you've got your answer. The problem is not hardware compatibility, or input-related protocols, the problem is that the interface itself is designed around tablets and touchscreen, with the implicit idea of mouse and desktops being a thing of the past. The meaning of the sarcasm is : the evolution of windows will probably stray farther and farther away from the mouse-friendly interfaces that some of us prefer.

Updating the installer ahead of the store page might be a deliberate part of the process (with customer feedback providing reassurance that the fix works on systems out in the wild), especially now that they are guaranteeing compatibility. Many games had the store pages updated without the installers being changed.

Other digital services only list whatever OS versions existed when the game was first released, so not having every version listed on GOG probably isn't a big deal in the end.

Updates to make games work on newer OS versions will often also work going backwards. Some GOG installers use differing files and settings where applicable (e.g. a fix that's only relevant for Windows 8 and newer won't be applied when running the installer on 7 and earlier) so separate installers won't be needed.

If GOG installers stopped working on XP at some point you could extract them with innounp. I wouldn't expect installers to be incompatible any time soon.

When Windows 8.1 removed Empire Earth compatibility, a piece of my soul died. :(

I don't have a problem with a Windows version every few years. So long as they keep supporting legacy software or a good decade or so, I think that's fair.

I can't think of anything I want from Windows right now. Win7 scratched all my itches. Except perhaps more legacy software support. And I doubt that will happen. Oh -- and built in stuff like Stardock Fences and junk.
haha. I've totally done that on my 360.

I have a friend whose XBOX ONE cannot understand him at all. Not 1 bit. Not a single word at all. He was jabbering at it to sow me and I said something like XBOX Play Forza 6. Woop. Forza 6 loaded up, while he was talking at it, too. It's like his voice is transparent somehow.

Too bad for your joke it is not like that and works great. Voice is the next mainstream navigation, even touch is a joke compared to it. Give it some time and you'll be laughing at how terrible it was to use a device that must sit on a stable platform, move that device around in order to move a pointer on a display, use force to press the device in order for some action on the screen to start happening.

If I didn't know you better as a Microsoft fanatic I'd think you were being ironic.

The Xbox One's voice control is quite possibly the worst thing I have ever seen. I came back from a friend's house last week - the first time I'd actually seen an Xbox One in operation - and the most fun we had was trying to get the Kinect to actually do anything. The joke above actually comes from that evening - we were sat there trying to say "Xbox gehe zur Startseite" and "Xbox Ton aus" several times before picking up the joypad/receiver remote and just doing it from there. On one occasion, the Xbox actually went to the start page when another person said he was leaving, and it also opened Skype as well, although I never did figure out why it did that.

Some day, you'll realise how using a computer silently was lame. You'll think back about those times where you had to tire your hand on a mouse instead of simply saying "left left right up left", and you'll laugh so loud that it will open six applications, eject your drive and start the format process twice.

It's ruined the graphics for a lot of people (as noted by the recent posts in http://www.gog.com/forum/empire_earth_series#1389505515 ). But there are fixes for many people. I haven't been able to fix it on 8.1, but I have plenty of machines that I can still run it on.

I just hope that in the future, it doesn't get worse for some of these classic titles.

I've always said I'd become insane if people at our office were voice-commanding their PCs, or all people voice commanding their phones in the bus. Or me spelling this text out loud right now in the middle of the night while my gf is trying to sleep a few meters from me.

That said, voice commands have their place, e.g. in car navigation. Maybe they are not mature enough yet to pick Finnish street names, but as long as it would understand me spelling an address to it.

I wish it would become more feasible to run old Windowses on virtual machines, or Wine (on Linux) kept getting better and better. Like we aren't really worried about our MS-DOS games anymore thanks to DOSBox, heck even Android devices can run them nowadays.

Depending only on Windows staying backwards compatible is unfortunately a dead-end in the long run. After all, it hasn't been DOS game compatible ever since XP (counting only the Windows versions aimed at home market, not NT3.51 or Win2000...).