Microsoft for all its many faults is very good at listening to customer feedback. Once you consider that their main customers are enterprise and government you begin to understand how many of their decisions get made.
No, that is the C++ team blog and talks about the CRT from 2012 being made to run on XP, which it doesn't at the moment due to it taking reliance on Vista+ platform APIs. This has nothing to do with .NET.
Its interesting to see where MS diverts from this; WP7 and Windows 8. WP7 and Windows 8 are both responses to disruption from iOS and Android.
With WP7 Microsoft jettisoned compatibility with Windows Mobile phones (which had been somewhat popular in enterprise) and with Windows 8, they introduce a radically different UI.
