Games incompatibility with Vista

I know this is not new and according to the Age of Empires community website, a number of compatibility issues with Windows Vista have been fixed. I am an avid fan of the Age of Empires franchise and have played all of the games in that except I think Age of Mythology. I played Age of Empires III and was totally impressed with the game. I recently upgraded my new computer to Windows Vista and last night I tried to install AOE III and was immediately greeted with the ugly message that there are known compatibility issues with Windows Vista and that I can check on the internet for possible solutions. I had Windows look for solutions online but it went nowhere. I was totally disappointed with Microsoft on this situation.

Both are their products. One is a great product which is selling good in the market, the second is a new one that they are launching as next generation operating system and they don't work together? I was disappointed with Microsoft on two counts:

1. Both being their products, they could not ensure that at least their products work with each other. Given that Vista has tightened a lot of controls on how programs interact with the operating system and I think they were preaching other software makers to change their programs or lose out. But to think that their own programmers were making software in the same way, it just doesn't seem and sound right to me. Then Microsoft has no right to tell anyone to change the way they build software. To their credit they have come up with a patch to correct this flaw.

2. And that is precisely what is the cause of my second dissatisfaction. If they code Windows in such a way that it can search the Microsoft database for known solutions, then why the heck did it not find the patch? OK, the program is not installed yet, but if they are talking about known solutions, then this should have been found and possibly presented as a download.

If this is the situation with Microsoft's own products, then other software makers should definitely be flinching at this prospect. From my experience with Windows Vista, I know that most of the games won't work. In Beta, Vista refused to run any third party games outright, whereas in RTM it is at least giving an option to run in compatibility mode. But for me that is a less than optimal solution. How can I explain to my 2 year old son that he can't play his favourite Reader Rabbit games because I upgraded to Windows Vista? In Windows XP, he could just pop in the CD and it would start automatically (Yes, he used to do that). But here I have to manually select what I want to run.

It seems that in making Windows Vista secure, Microsoft has lost the perspective of the bigger picture and might lose out on the market share. Not only is the compatibility an issue, but its cost ($399) and hardware requirements are going to be a big turn-off for end users who might just switch to Mac and Linux and use Wine (for Linux) to run Windows programs.