What Apple did for Macs when switching architectures, though, was to port their own software to the new architecture. Microsoft doesn’t even port fucking Minesweeper to ARM.

this is for the transition. no point in porting your software if nobody has the hardware. This will get people to get the hardware, as they can just keep using the existing software, and wait until it’s properly ported

No, this won’t get people to get hardware that looks horribly slow because everything needs to run through a translation layer. They do have the sources. They could just recompile them for the new hardware. If their sources are not total crap.

I’d expect there’s quite a lot of assembly and endianness-dependent stuff here and there. It’s Microsoft. Their culture is about pride of things being arcane-complex inside, cause if you can untangle that, you are a good programmer. They think that. I think they think that. Maybe they are just vile.

Windows NT historically ran on lots of CPU architectures, PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, etc, and that included the bundled software like 3D Pinball. I would have expected it to still be quite portable.