yeah, wine's trajectory is the complete opposite of MS.

I reject the idea that MS is the expert in MS stuff. corporate structure and institutional knowledge and strategy are not the same as a person knowing something. I'm sure there are people in MS who know more than anyone. but together I suspect they're far far less than the sum of their parts.

I remember trying to open word-97 .doc files in office 2002.

Surely MS knows how to read it's own file format? Nope, well, not as well as star/sun/open/libreoffice (whichever one it was at the time).

I'm sure someone in MS was saying "lets do a bit more work on backwards compatibility"; I'm pretty sure that person was immediately tied to the desk with a giant annoying ribbon and forced to become familiar with a whole box of paperclip suppositories.

Oh hang on, that was decades ago, they've grown so much since then .

Yes, because Microsoft knows stuff in Windows that can be utilized in WINE. And maybe open sourcing a few parts to add to it. We are talking about WINE, an open source project where Microsoft doesn't have the entire say. We can check and correct or reject, unlike whatever happens in closed source Windows.