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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
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
hehe, I knew someone would mention linux ;)
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
Sorry beg to differ. Win XP is tons more stable than Win98...this is provided you're working on a fresh install of course...even Microsoft can't guarantee what happens in an upgrade..and don't get me started on security. At least hitting esc on the WinXP logon screen doesn't start up your machine! Now having said all that, I'm going close Wine now.. HA HA!
My Favourite Meme
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.
Hear, hear!
I just about choked when I saw the word "company" and "98SE" in the same sentence, here in 2004.
I can see it happening on a couple of legacy systems spread around a company, but to have an entire company on it? Jesus - and I thought the company I worked for was behind!
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.
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.
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.
I can see it happening on a couple of legacy systems spread around a company, but to have an entire company on it?
Why not? Windows 98 is only 6 years old. Something that young should not be defined as legacy. For almost all uses it is functionally equivalent to XP, so why bother to upgrade?
You must be new here.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
I can think of a couple right off the bat:
* XP doesn't hang when shutting down (at least in my experience)
* Multi-user profiles
* Built-in USB 2.0 support (SP1?)
* System Restore (buggy though it can be, it's better than nothing.)
* MMC
I'm no fan of XP, but the issues and capabilities listed above make supporting XP (and 2000) a lot easier for us than 98 was.
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.
You can bypass the XP logon screen by booting from a boot disk with NTFS read/write support and replacing the logon screensaver file (%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\logon.scr) with the executable of your choice, such as cmd.exe. Restart and wait a few minutes for the "screensaver".
+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.
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.
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.
You can bypass the Linux logon screen by booting from a boot disk with Ext2FS (or ReiserFS, depending on the system) read/write support and replacing the login binary file (/bin/login) with the executable of your choice, such as /bin/sh. Restart and wait a few minutes for the "login prompt".
...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 ?
Even more important--actual password requirements. On 98 all you need to do to get past the password/username prompt is hit escape and you're in. XP at least beats that.
I have to agree that XP is a huge step up from 98SE. I find it to be much more stable, though I have had it hang on shut down, but that's pretty rare, and frequently a hardware problem.
I also like USB 2.0 support, even though none of my peripherals actually use it.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
* Still having about half the company using a PIII 500 MHz.
In the US computers are FAR cheaper than in Europe and get replaced much faster.
Of course, Microsoft has a very US-centric point-of-view...
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.
Lots of companies are actually buying Windows XP and then downgrade the licences to Windows 2000...
Who needs a media when they have all versions of if in the MSDN?
They only need more licences...
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.
* XP doesn't hang when shutting down (at least in my experience)
Two patches and Win98SE hangs on shutdown are not a problem, either.
* Multi-user profiles
are a PITA! The easiest way to transfer something to another user is to drop it on his desktop. Drilling down through endless layers of heirarchy to locate the correct desktop is easy? Have you tried copying My Documents from one user to another? Or duplicating the desktop for two users? Silly XP copies all user rights with them, requiring extra work to make them accesible. Trying to install software and make it accessible to many users on one machine is still an exercise in futility. All the XP machines in our shop run users as Administrator because of the software we use so there are no security advantages. Overall, MS doesn't really get multi-users yet.
* Built-in USB 2.0 support (SP1?)
and what devices in a business environment doyou use USB 2.0 for?
* System Restore (buggy though it can be, it's better than nothing.)
I turn it off on the XP machines at work. More often than not, I find it rolling things back at random times and destroying whatever I last installed. I find it simpler and faster to use Drive Image and image the entire system to another part of the hard disk each time I update the machines. This also has the advantage of allowing me to roll back Windows updates, which don't always work as they were intended even to the point of removing themselves! Buggy as it is, System Restore is not better than nothing!
* MMC
No comment. We can't use it in our environment (NT4.0 server and lotsa win98 machines).
Most of the advantages in XP seem to be meant for home users, not business users. Most of the systems in our shop do not have (or need) speakers, so multi-media extensions built into XP are no advantage.
The main computer use is one user to one machine. If that person is sick or missing, then the only reason another user would log onto that machine is to do the same tasks as that user, and, as I pointed out above, another user on that machine would not have access to the same files and programs as the original user. The only way to do the same job is to log on as the same user! So what good does multi-users on one machine do?
We use NT 4.0 as server, mostly Win98SE as workstations and it works fine for us. Stability is not an issue. The only thing we ever needed from Microsoft was to fix their buggy product! Instead, they keep releasing new versions that don't always work and play well with earlier products and bring a whole new set of bugs. Win 2k is OK on our network; XP Home blows on our network and XP Pro is buggier than Win 98SE! The GUI "improvements", love or hate them, are different and require a lot of getting used to. Upgrading en masse is not an option.
In short, I see one good reason why companies are sticking with NT and Win98SE; it works OK in a business environment. I think that this move by Microsoft is just listening to the market.
Yeah well we are still using Win 95 and DOS 6.22 for shop floor related stuff because it won't run on anything newer. Try dealing with 100 DOS systems every day
Yes, the office PCs are W2K and the servers run Linux & Netware and are relatively modern.
Actually, this really doesn't work........I've tried it.
Something checks the parameters of login.scr now.
...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.
Google Zeitgeist still reports Windows 98 at a solid 21% and Windows 95 still gets 1%. This isn't a perfect sampling, but it is telling that there a lot of Win 98 holdouts, probably due to the boom of the late 1990s. With Win 98 still so popular, software vendors would have to think long and hard whether to support only XP and/or 2000.
While Win 98 does feel rather primitive compared to more modern stuff, it and Windows 2000 are the last big releases that dont have all the activation nonsense.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I agree, 2000 was the best OS they ever made - and putting aside the holy wars for a second, is probably one of the best operating systems ever. As we all know, XP is really just 2000 with too much memory-grabbing-computer-slowing graphics; if they had just called 2000 "NT 5" it wouldn't have felt half as dated as it does - after all, Windows 3.x was around for about 12 years.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
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
Given that XP is still unstable I stoped reading there. XP is NOT unstable.
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
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.
if it wasnt for MS .. 98% of the posts wouldnt be here :P
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
I agree that Win2k is a great OS.
They DO call it NT 5 though. And XP is NT 5.1.
The fancy XP theme can be reverted back to the old drab Win2k theme with about 4 mouse clicks.
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 --
No it wont. Not because the components are missing, but because of licencing. But you are right; that isn't so minor.
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