Except there's a difference between Windows 9x and everything else. Everything else is NT based (the 9x series wasn't). And XP was Windows-5 'for the consumer' (Win2000 being the actual Win5). Windows Server are just variants of the NT builds (2003 is a variant of NT 5).
NT 3.x -> NT 4.x -> 2000/XP -> Vista (NT 6.x) -> 7 (NT 6.x) -> 8 (NT 6.x)
The original Xbox was 32-bit. XBone is 64-bit. While x86-64 makes it possible to run 32-bit stuff without actual emulation, it doesn't mean it's a freebee to implement into the OS. DX8 to DX9 wasn't that big of a transition. However, the transition from DX8 to DX11 is. Besides the software emulation needed, they would also have to emulate the hardware, and in the case of game discs, would have to support some of that hardware.
So yeah, there is an incompatible architecture. Plus there's the issue of marketing "Xbox One is backwards compatible with Xbox 1 games!". Face it, it just gives MS a chance to make HA10 2.0. Not H2A10, but HA10 2.0. H2A10 comes next year. Then Halo 5 in 2015. Then Halo Wars 2 shortly before they announce the Xbox Infinity in 2023.
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