Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Extends Product Lifecycle
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has decided to extend product support on business and developer products effective June 1, 2004. Mainstream support remains unchanged at 5 years, extended support is greatly extended from 2 to 5 years and Online self-help support is extended from 8 to 10 years. I have to say kudos to Microsoft on this one."
"...Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Server and Tools Marketing..." Geez, how many VP's does Microsoft have???
Microsoft is slowly shifting its business toward "support" since software will inevitably become free.
Being a tech, i have often felt that MS should have been doing this for years. It makes me wonder if LINUX isn't scaring them a bit.
Sincerely, Czephyr
Given that XP is still unstable and incompatable and given that longhorn will proobly be the biggest risk of an operating system a company can take up, along with more incompatabilities, I wouldn't be surprized if companies stuck with Windows 98SE until 2008.
....butnotasgoodaslinuxofcourse.. :E
Pity Microsoft stopped selling 2000. They'd be making a killing about now. I still think 2000 was the best windows offering so far....
Their Business leadership team is here
Their Board of Directors listingis here In case those links act up, scroll down using your arrow keys or whatever you use to scroll.
If you can't figure out an OS in 5 years, maybe you should reconsider the whole "computer" thing.
The thing you have to remember about Microsoft is that it, like almost any large company, is not monolithic. It is made up of a number of fiefdoms, some of which compete for the same resources (customers, money, prestige, etc) and are therefore at war with one another, the terms of which are defined by what is possible when both are part of a larger whole. This is why things like .NET made it to market. It was sold to the marketing department, the OS department, the Office development department, and the developer tools department (visual studio) with each one seeing it as something different.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I can run Win98 for another 4 years on my home machine?
They seem to have the shortest product lifecycles i've ever seen.
.. :)
OTOH i'd have thought that it'd be in microsoft's interests to force people to upgrade by withdrawing support from win98 etc...
Maybe they really are scared
It's too bad RedHat won't do something similar. They have pitifully short product lifecycles.
I didn't know we let Bill Gates post as anonymous coward. That explains a lot actually.
The more you know, the less you understand.
Microsoft announced that the release of their new OS codenamed Longhorn has been further delayed
Having online support on office tools for 10 years seems pretty good to me, but for developer tools it should be even longer.
Ever had to muck around in a 10 year old project (someone elses at that), where the tools used to build it have been deemed obsolete for 5 years? Not fun.
There isn't even any OSS software that doesn't need bug fixing. Please, if you're going to troll at least do it with something RESEMBLING a logical argument.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
You just know they forsee needing to support Longhorn for the Longhaul.
flinging poop since 1969
This sounds more like a make-news project than anything, didn't they just drop all their support options.. some of the ones they're fixing now? Sounds more like this was planned all along and is being used to garner pro-MS support.
"Hey, did you hear.. Microsoft just upped all their support options, our windows computers are covered for another couple years.."
*sigh*.. a wise decision to keep support, even though it probably was planned marketing decision from the start.
Has anybody else tried to access the Microsoft support site?
I have a PC and everytime I come across problems with it, I have one of two options. Either lug it to a computer engineer or access this website. I have to say both are equally difficult.
disagree with the statement "kudos for Microsoft". What 11 out of the first 13 replies to the post do not seem to realize is that the post is talking about O/S support not a religion. Personally I find the MS developers site informative, simple and free. I wonder how many of the 11 have actually tried to use it (gasp, some of us still have customers who use NT4). Oh how I wish I hadn't squandered my mod points.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
every bug
Does anyone else find it ironic that one of their board members is named William Greed?
The ______ Agenda
If you force customers to upgrade too quick, you risk loosing customers. If you let them have the same shit forever, you don't make money. I mean, as you pointed out with Rhat, it is just an insanely short support cycle. They got knocked out of the running for our offical supported Linux for that reason. We don't want to have to upgrade every year. Money isn't the real issue, we have no problem with yearly support contracts, it's the idea that we need to move to a new OS version every singe year.
The length of support is the reason that you don't see much shit over the 2k/XP thing. I mean if people were forced to upgrade to a new OS to the tune of $100-$300 (depending on the deal you get) after one year, we'd all be pissed. However 2k is still supported, and will remain so for a few more years. So we get XP on new systems, and keep 2k on existing systems.
Now personally, I think they are extending it a bit too long. After 5-6 years, you need to be thinking about moving to a new OS, for desktops at least and even for servers. I mean commodity hardware just isn't all that reliable at that amount of time. Try getting a Dell warantee for 6+ years. Big iron is different, you buy a mainframe, it better last 20 years, but little x86 desktops and servers really need to be looking at being EOL'd after 6 years max, and the OS likewise.
But, I'll take it. I'd rather have longer support than shorter support.
"An anonymous reader writes"
:o)
and
"I have to say kudos to Microsoft on this one"
What! Doesn't Bill have a slashdot account?
I expect this is coming from two quarters:
1.Finally listening to customers. Customers don't want to keep on hearing "Remember that shit you bought from us last year? Well is is crap and broken and you have to buy the new one! hahahahhahahha". Eventually their assholes start to get sore and they go somewhere else. Now that Novell is back in town with a cool offering, people will be thinking of a switch...
In many countries and I expect US states you have to provide minimum support periods of some years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Compatibility between new and old versions of the same product is not an option because there is no such thing.
Give them a break.... Linux was written by only one person (and a few helpers) in one year (ie one year per programmer). Microsoft has a few hundred programmers so to be fair you should also give them the same time (ie. one year per programmer) -- a few hundred years -- before you start bad mouthing them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You must be new here.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Anyone else cynical enough to immediately think that this is just to stop people considering their options when they realise that their support's suddenly run out?
There's plenty of businesses out there running older versions of windows who might look elsewhere rather than upgrade if there was no support.
That said, better software support is probably generally a good thing.
but they obviously have *cough* a certain linux *cough* company *cough, redhat... die* beat....
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/
So that's about 1 VP per 300-400 employees (not sure if that includes all international divisions).
Corporate VP's are usually junior VP's in charge of an individual division.
Senior VP's manage a group of divisions (say all the Windows product development divisions). There are about 20 Senior VP's at Microsoft.
The Group VP's are the big honchos who manage, say, all of product development, or marketing. Look like there are three Group VP's.
Given how long it's looking to get Longhorn out the door, even those who have moved to XP will be on the selfhelp by the time Longhorn is released.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Actually, some of the older software like Apache is pretty damn stable. I'll be very surprised if you can point out MS software that's as complex as something like apache and has less issues.
It's a trap!!!
that fact he's only now beginning to understand, tells me he's been here a while...
Windows Me was D.O.A. Yet Microsoft still manages to pull off a miracle and keep this brain dead patient alive!
It is a miracle that they found some poor bastards that want continued support for it.
+5 (Big Picture). Improvements to a companies existing infrastucture need to follow an evolutionary path. All O/S's can be made to communicate with each other. All operating systems have bugs. The important differences are how cost effectively the bugs can be fixed, how much will it cost to intergrate into existing systems, what are the training costs. Sensible IT departments (an oxymoron perhaps?) would run a pilot (pick a victim) to try and determine these and any other costs. I did some quick Darwinian simulations and it says "the infrastructure will eventually evolve the ability to program the users".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Hmmm, the desktop market is being extended. Not so sure about developers. From the Visual C++ site: .Net.
Mainstream support for Visual C++ has been extended by one year and will end on September 30, 2004. Extended support is available from October 1, 2004 through September 30, 2005
So this is to keep those Windows 98 businesses in a windows upgrade cycle, but developers have to move to
*Spots something out corner of eye*
What is this kylix, Delhpi?
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
We are up to 90 comments now and my original small sample is looking more and more like a statistical oddity. Maybe zealots can type faster ??? ResearchGrant(TM)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The sooner M$ stops supportin Wincrap 95/98/ME, the better.
Windows 95/98/ME suck, have always sucked and will always suck due to the shared memory architecture that makes it easier for applications to step on other applications or worse still on the core OS itself.
The Windows NT series doesnt have this problem because it has a much better memory architecture.
Regarding the problem with your text. We think someone may have changed the default character set on your machine.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Is this step really suprising?
No, because their very own bugs force them to obey the wishes off their customers: customers seem to use OS software longer that MS think they should, hence they tried to control the lifecycle by ceasing support. What is the consequence of this?
Millions of unpatched machines out there spreading viruses and spam all over the internet. And what should Microsoft's reaction to that inconvenient side effect of using MS products be: "Sorry, no more support!"?!? That should easily make for the biggest PR desaster in corporate history. They simple realised that and adjusted support to the longer lifetime that their OSes unfortunately have in the wild.
Did you ever heard of Dr Knuth and TeX?
...Longhorn.
It would be somewhat amusing if 2K/XP reached EOL and Longhorn would still be "coming right up".
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
I have to say kudos to Microsoft on this one.
If i remember correctly Qdos was how the whole Microsoft OS thing got started. So no more kudos for them now, ok ?
is to too challenging for you to read other postings first? your argument was already uttered three times!
I have been running XP on a PII 450 MHz with 384mb ram for about two years doing high end 3d modeling and rendering. It works fine.
I think it is a message to corporations; slow to upgrade, fearful of lack of support because of it. This solidifies that.
Windows 95 was designed to run with 2 megabytes of RAM.
Windows NT was designed never to crash.
They failed on both objectives, but you can see that each one came a lot closer to what it was designed to do than to design points that were ignored.
Windows Longhorn is designed to have no security exploits. It will be interesting to see how that one plays out.
In my opinion, if you want to run Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP, you really need these minimum specs:
:-)
Pentium II 300 MHz or Celeron "A" 333 MHz CPU
256 MB of RAM
A 12 GB hard drive with ATA-33 interface.
I'm running Win2K Pro on an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron "A" 500 MHz CPU, 384 MB of RAM and 20 GB ATA-66 hard drive running in ATA-33 mode; I've have no problems with system response issues.
But not on the desktop. A lot of the legacy test code is written to work under DOS. There isn't enough time to develop some needed tools, let alone re-write legacy ones on a more up to date platform. But I suspect at some point it will become very hard to find the necessary device drivers for Win98, so we will be stuck using old PCs, and it will have to be done.
My rights don't need management.
I run windows XP (with the eye candy turned off) on a K6-III 450. with 384 megs of ram - and it runs great.
I run Windows 2000 on a P-133 laptop with 80 megs of ram, and a (slow) 4500rpm HD. and it runs just as fast as Windows 98: It actually boots faster now. System response is not perfect - but it is fast enough not to be frustrating. A lot better than ANY linux window manager I got working on this old laptop.
That is what dosbox, or something similar will be used for. True, dosbox does not have printer port or serial port emulation yet, but once those are completed, just upgrade to linux or windows 2000.
...that everyone was going to upgrade every time they came out with something new? Oh, damn, thats right they did think that.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Microsoft has been using short product support times (along with many other techniques) to force regular software product upgrades onto their corporate users. They did not wake up one morning and say: "oh, let's suddenly be nicer to our customers and help them stay with the old product longer instead of buying a new product from us." It seems clear to me that enough corporate customers balked at the relentless upgrade cycle Microsoft was trying to impose that they had to back down. Good news for consumers, bad news for Microsoft's bottom line.
The problem with free 'as in freedom' is it can result in free 'as in beer' which is all well and fine for generic applications but not good for specialised software.
for example, the software company i work for produces structural engineering software. These applications take many years to develop and improve apon and have a very limited customer base. As a result, in order to turn even a marginal profit, the company has to charge a fairly high sum (3-5 grand depending on the product).
I simply purchase a single copy of their software and sell it for half the price. That is until someone else does the same thing to me. Thus the cost of the product falls considerably and the comapny can't even cover the costs of development
I understand how GPL makes a lot of sense for a kick ass web browser or word processor, but for specialised niche software where most users aren't programmers, open source isn't and shouldn't eb the model of choice
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first programming language EVER!!! So how could they have bought BASIC?
It's even on an official microsoft page so it must be true...
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
this is direct proof consumers are not willing to upgrade simly because Microsoft says so. As time goes on, it will become hard and harder for Microsoft to force upgrades on users. When you analyze Longhorn with this trend as a filter, I'm going to guess Longhorn is going to be a really hard sell for Microsoft.
they can afford to do this when all the call centers are in India. Suddenly techsupport can be profitable.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
MS has probably finally found that this is a requirement for doing business with the US Government (there is typically a 10 year support requirement). A prime example would be HP's support of the VAX version of OpenVMS, while either DEC or Compaq killed the VAX several years ago, HP still has to support if for a few more years.
It is pretty funny, actually. The editors (and I use that term VERY loosely) sit back and let their corporate masters (OSDN) pay them with advertising dollars from their other corporate masters (Microsoft). Also, I am pretty sure I read somewhere (though I may be making this up) that Slashdot would never have Flash ads. Obviously, this is not the case anymore. Even if they never said that, EVERYONE agrees that Flash ads are the spawn of satan. At least they aren't full-screen pop-ups with annoying music and sound effects. Yet. Though I suspect that within 3 years Slashdot will begin to resemble IGN.com.
I also find it somewhat entertaining that loyal Slashdot patrons block the ads here. I think that this shows the true nature of most readers here: if you're not going to give it to me for free, then I will just steal it!
Or, for the semantic crowd: if you're not going to give it to me for free, then I will just infringe its copyright!
if it wasnt for MS .. 98% of the posts wouldnt be here :P
Windoze and .Not is dying and even M$ knows that.
Linux and Java will beat the crap out of M$.
Every operationg system has its pros and cons. Microsoft is the most prominent. so it gets the most crap for it. but when you are pushing out a new OS every year or 2, of course is goign to have issues. now that the OSes are more advanced and have new featues, the long range of support will help many of us home users and businesses. with windows 2000, XP, and 2003 server its windows NT4 all over again... and it will be in use for the next decade again...
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
Because that's what Red Hat's RHEL life cycle is. In fact it may very well be the longest lifecycle for any Linux available. Although other vendors may be matching it now for all I know.
If you were talking about Fedora then well you get what you pay for. It was never meant to be a long term product and they were very up front about it from the beginning.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Why limiti self-help support to only 10 years?? Seriously, this type of info could remain online for ever with a negligible impact to microsoft's servers. For that matter, all companies should leave documentation online for as long as possible.
harmonious design
That's Bill Gates alter ego.
Bill becomes William.
Gates becomes a personal characteristic, but retains initial letter and word length.
"I have to say kudos to Microsoft on this one."
You must be new here.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Flamebait?
Does anyone care to enlighten me on what about the above post is flamebait?
Is it because I said that I found Win2k more responsive than any of the linux WMs, on my P133?
If so, then maybe what the trolls say about moderators as a whole is corrent.
A "-1 offtopic" moderation I could understand, but flamebait? Come on!
I only posted the above AC because it was off topic, and not really a response intended for the general public, just intended for the authors of this sub thread.
Microsoft has figured out that its next version is doomed. To prevent competitors from gaining market share, they're extending support on previous versions. ;)
-- SYS 64738 --
Extending support? Support should continue on all their products until such time as they have removed all the bugs and corrected all the security faults. No other industry can get away with dropping support on faulty products why should the software industry. If they want to drop support on a faulty product prior to fixing it completely they should be forced to offer a refund. Microsoft is making changes only because their current customers, ex customers and soon to be ex customers are making them. So it is not the only the strengths of Linux making Microsft dance to its tune, it is the customers decision to use Linux that is forcing Microsoft to attempt to catch up, of course it is to little to late they have blown their customers trust on profits.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen