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Microsoft Extends Product Lifecycle

Posted by timothy on from the good-if-you-use-their-stuff dept.

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."

10 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. if you know how to browse the web, you would know by atari2600 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:RedHat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    *sigh*
    Try trolling with a newer link:
    http://www.redhat.com/software/rhelorfedora /

  3. Microsoft has about 150 to 200 VP's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:It's about time by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative
    Excel was actually quite the pioneer. it was the *first* spreadsheet program that had a full blown GUI.

    Have you ever used Lotus 123 for DOS? It has a GUI, not Windows but a GUI, though in earlier versions text driven (i.e. you open the menus by typing the first letter), but you could also use arrow keys. Mouse support was added later, before Excel I think. It was able to make all kinds of charts from a very early version. Anyway, I saw no basic difference with Excel and didn't bother to change until years after Excel came out.

  5. Re:It's about time by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative
    The whole point of Office is to be more than just four different applications that come in the same box

    Most people use just Word, a smaller proportion use Excel, a few percent use Access. I can't even remember rhat the fourth is. (Outlook? Publisher?)

    That's why it has been so successful.

    I rather think that it was the bundle (Office) cost barely more than Word alone. Pricing, marketing, bundling and OEM sales drove it to dominance.

  6. Re:Unsurprizing by stev_mccrev · · Score: 3, Informative

    I work in web management services in a government department in queensland, aus.

    I use a pc running 98SE - so does everyone else in my department.

    And yes, it is sad.

  7. Re:It's about time by grahamlee · · Score: 2, Informative

    You remember incorrectly. Bill Gates wrote most of Altair BASIC, with the help of Paul Allen, who was busy writing an Altair emulator for the DEC PDP-10. Some sources, should you like ;-).

  8. That's how it all started by LupeSpywalper · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 ?

  9. Government support requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Preparing for the GNU/world? by femto · · Score: 2, Informative

    Look the word 'free' up in the dictionary. You will see that it has two meanings.

    1. Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. Not subject to external restraint
    2. Costing nothing; gratuitous: a free meal.
    'Free as in beer' and 'Free in speech' is an attempt to explain this shortcoming of the English language, whereby 'free' has two meanings.

    'Free as in beer' refers to the 'zero cost' meaning of free. Beer can be free in that it doesn't cost money, but it is not free in that it has liberty.

    'Free as in speech' refers to the 'liberty' meaning of free. Speech can be free in that it is not subject to external restraint, but we don't normaly talk about the monetary value of speech.

    The Free software movement says that Free software is 'Free as in speech', but not 'free as in beer'. That is, Free software is not subject to external influence but it doesn't necessarily cost zero dollars.

    Hence there is no analogy between Free software and free beer. GoofyBoy is feeding you a crock of shit. The analogy is between Free software and Free speech.

    The Spanish (and French and Italians) don't have this grammatical problem, as they have different words for the different concepts of 'free as in speech' (libre) and 'free as in beer' (gratis).

    As an English speaker, I usually mangle my grammar and use 'Free' (capitalised) when talking about Free software and 'free' (lower case) when talking about free beer.

    Hope this helps.