What developers are horrified by this? I thought for your enterprise apps that you can continue to use the Windows 7 skin. For developers of the new Windows 8 platform I think this is a great opportunity for developers to get content into the hands of traditional users in a new way.
MS has lost a lot of trust when they killed off VFP and then VB6. People with large codebases had to migrate and it means loss of competitive advantage making new code do old things.
People didn't have to migrate though. I know we still have some internal VB6 apps floating around that work fine and do the job they were made to do. Of course they are on the 'upgrade to .net eventually' list, but so far there has been no rush.
Once MS stops development of VB6, the deathclock on its runtime has effectively started. The VB6 runtime may in the future only run on XP emulation. The situation is even more dire with the IDE. The support has effectively run out and if the next release of Windows doesn't support it, you are on your own trying to keep the environment going on an old machine.
