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Comment by votepaunchy | Hacker News Reader

How "old" is sufficient? Forever?

Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?

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My question would be how could you bake into the original cost the cost of long term support when you have no idea how long one might use it? Windows XP was only end of life after 14 years. Some people STILL use it. I doubt the $139 price 14 years ago was expected to cover more than 5 years of use. Would $5/month forever make more sense?

You treat SW as a service and sell licenses instead of "boxed" copies.

I bet a lot of the companies buying thousands of copies of windows were treating them like assets and depreciating them over 3 years. Can't do that when its a subscription. Also no one was doing SaaS at wide scale until 9/10 years ago.

Anyone with an EA has been paying for SA For Windows for many many years.

The subscription is just a way to get rid of the perpetual right to use and effectively raise the rent. My marginal O365 user costs like 2x more because you cannot buy Office anymore in the EA that I have.

What do you mean by forced? Logically Microsoft should decide ahead of time how long they are going to support a given version and publish this information so that potential buyers can decide whether its sufficient before buying. They do this, and you can read online how long they intend to support the software you are buying today.

They never seem to get an outburst of positive emotion when they do extend support for a product well beyond its original end-of-life either. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

You mean, do something like this? [0]

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifec...

You made a footnote for one line?

>How "old" is sufficient? Forever?

When the car I still drive was as old as WinXP is now, it was part of a 3.6 million vehicle recall for the cruise-control shutoff switch. The fix involved splicing in some kind of bypass in the wiring harness; so that was potentially 3.6 million parts, installed one at a time. If Ford can do that, why can't Microsoft write a patch for XP?

Forced? No. But to avoid PR this bad? Probably.

At some point, the support stops being pulled from the product budget and starts being pulled from the advertising budget.

Dollars to doughnuts its worth it in the end.

If they don't also fix "end-of-life" that's also in the wild, they'll get a ton of black eyes every time something like this happens.

Enterprise apps live for a long time. IBM stuff in production is still around from the 1970s.

Microsoft actively pursued (and screwed) this market.

IBM stuff that survives from the 70s does so because those organizations planned their future hardware and software migrations. z/OS releases are supported for 3 years after release. You then have to update to the N+1 or N+2 version. Windows releases are supported for 11 years. You then have to pay for extended support or update. This has always been the case. This is well known. If you're running an internet connected XP machine and not paying for extended support you have nobody to blame but yourself. It is not Microsoft's responsibility to support all versions of their software indefinitely and for free.

That's the PR.

Lots of that software is old junk. IBM supports at the OS level applications written in whatever technology was around in 1978 today.

If you wrote your core business application in VB6 or an early .Net Framework, Microsoft cut you off at the knees.

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