The balancing act is a problem, I won't argue with you there.
I agree that at some point they need to cut their losses, and as I said in my previous post virtualization offers the "convenient out" that they've been looking for.
However, you made the reference to apple.... M$ doesn't need to follow Apple. Apple is *TOO* aggressive with it's policy of shafting it's customers on backward compatibility.
G4 towers which were disabled from booting OS9 are the classic example of Apple's "screw you mr customer" mentality.
Apple didn't deliberately block them from running OS 9; they just didn't write drivers for OS 9 that would allow it to work on the new hardware. True, it inconvenienced some number of users, but Apple has always been aggressive about deprecating obsolete technology and it generally works out well in the end. The iMac led the way in getting rid of floppy drives, for example.