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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
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!
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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!
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.
You just know they forsee needing to support Longhorn for the Longhaul.
flinging poop since 1969
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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 ?
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.
...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.
Why is it the first thing I noticed about your list is that MS programs worked and non-MS didn't? More hidden API's? Or just companies not following the rules?
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.