Why can't I install LR5 on Vista 64?

Question

I have LR5 beta running fine on my Vista64 set up (6 core processor, 16gb ram, HD7770oc 1GB graphics card), but the latest trial states "Needs Win7 or above to work."
Given that the core of win7 is the same as Vista, and pretty much every program written for Win 7 runs on Vista, why the new restriction? It's not as if Vista has been made "unsupported" by Microsoft, and the fact that the beta still runs on Vista64 shows that the production version should also run fine, if the stupid install restriction was removed.
Is there a work-around for this? Or will you release an update to allow Vista 64 users to use LR5?

Answer 1

Also, DdeGannes, You are grossly underestimating the cost of an upgrade. It doesn't cost $20 to upgrade your mac, or a little bit more to upgrade a pc. It cost hours and hours of reinstalling your favorite software, settings things up, getting existing (legacy) stuff to work, not to mention hardware. Additionaly, in companies, it costs dozens of man-hours of testing, approval through several layers of management, all kinds of important figures who want to have a say in it, et flipping cetera. An upgrade is VERY costly when you're not just a person by yourself.
On top of that, Vista is a fine OS. It has its quirks here and there, but most of it was fixed in the latest SP. Same goes for Snow Leopard - that too I imagine is a perfectly fine working OS. Why upgrade something that works fine? The only thing that can happen is something breaking if everything works.
XP is a different story. XP and Vista are radically different in many ways. For an application that uses the GPU to render, I'm not totally surpized that supporting XP was too much effort, not to mention its extended support is going to end next year, iirc. No surpizes there, XP is 11 years old. But Vista is "only" 6 years old, while its latest SP is only 4 years old. Not awfully old, iyam.
Add another factor: most users who are not computer geeks (and let's face it, not all photographers are computer geeks) dare to reinstall their OS. Soooo many people believe (rightfully, in a way) that the OS is inseperable part of the pc. This is true for mobile devices, so why not for pc's? In fact, the OS came with it, installed and ready-to-go. Most people don't even think of reinstalling an OS. And before you go "upgrade it then"... No. Upgrading an OS is not-done as any nephew or brother-in-law will tell you. A clean install is the way to go, for reasons that have been obvious for a billion years now, and a clean install is not done by most run-of-the-mill users.
So, some people are "stuck" with Vista, or Snow Leopard, or in fact with Windows XP. Oh yeah.
My guess is that Adobe drops support for semi-old OS'es because they simply don't want to put any resources into testing on them, nor giving official support on them. It's just naive, imo, because "it's not supported" should not be identical to "it doesn't work". And the forum shows I'm right about at least that part. Th least thing Adobe could do is give a big fat warning, just let it install, and let the user see what'll happen. If it works, yay! If it doesn't, it's not supported. But we will never know if Adobe goes about this, just like Microsoft does. At least Microsoft has an incentive (they want you to upgrade). Adobe is only (and only!) thinning their userbase.