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Microsoft Operating Systems Software Windows

Microsoft Extends Product Lifecycle 272

Posted by timothy 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."
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Microsoft Extends Product Lifecycle More

Microsoft Extends Product Lifecycle

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  • geez (Score:5, Funny)

    by Vasan ( 672337 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:22AM (#9294918)
    "...Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Server and Tools Marketing..." Geez, how many VP's does Microsoft have???

    • Microsoft has about 150 to 200 VP's (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @04:41AM (#9295130)
      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.

    • Re:geez (Score:4, Insightful)

      by K-boy ( 778847 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @12:50PM (#9297292)
      "Kudos to Microsoft on this one" - what are you talking about? This has nothing to do with kudos, it is a business decision pure and simple. The delay in a large number of software products has meant that Microsoft's existing support times are leaving large gaps for millions of customers to walk through.

      But, bigger than that, its Software Assurance programme - which it has stated it intends to make an increasing proportion of its revenue from - looked set to collapse unless it extended support because hundreds of thousands of them are up for renewal in July and many customers have been complaining they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and have received absolutely nothing in return (read the IT press for details).

      The support extension is because of product delays. It is nothing but a business decision to protect its market, especially when open-source alternatives are becoming more popular.

      Do you honestly think Microsoft would make this decision just because it reckons it would be nicer and fairer?

      No kudos at all. Simple business.

  • Preparing for the GNU/world? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:25AM (#9294931)
    Microsoft is slowly shifting its business toward "support" since software will inevitably become free.

    • Re:Preparing for the GNU/world? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by armyofone ( 594988 ) <armeeofone@hotmail.com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:59AM (#9295027)
      Maybe you're right. Y'know, I still haven't figured out why Microsoft has picked this fight with Linux. It's a war they can't possibly win. You can't compete with a hobby after all. And yes, before the zealots jump all over me, I know Linux is much more than a hobby these days. Still, that's what makes it virtually impossible to wipe out.

      It would be a much more interesting computer world today if MS had gone with the same attitude as IBM. Just think of where we could be if MS was contributing to open source in a big way instead of wasting resources trying to dis-credit it at every turn.

      I would guess that one result might be that their stock wouldn't be stuck at ~$25/share while Redhat's, (for example), has gone from $5/share up to $25 in the last several months. It seems shareholders and potential investors are biding their time and waiting to see how this all shakes out.

      • They don't need to kill Linux the hobby, they need to kill Linux the enterprise. They don't want companies choosing Linux over their product. If Windows was mandated for corporations (to use an extreme example) Microsoft would have no need to target Linux.
    • Business software will become free. I'm as much of a proponant of OSS as much as the next person on /., but I don't think Microsoft will let go of the general consumer bracket in my lifetime. That's not to say that the techno-savy person won't install GNU/Windows on his computer instead of Longhorn, because it's been shown that their business ended technology is far superior to their personal iterations.

      There's also the principle behind games. Most serious games that feature multiplayer aspects, as we
      • You mean proprietary, closed-source software can't be hacked? Quick, someone pass me a copy of Windows for my servers!

      • Re:Preparing for the GNU/world? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by BasilBrush ( 643681 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @06:02AM (#9295298)
        Are you very old, or do you have a terminal disease? If not, and you have a reasonable life expectancy, think back instead forwards to see how things change over the longer term. Say your life expectancy is 40 years, back in 1964 computers were few in number and filled a large room. Now there is more power in a PDA than in that room back then.

        Microsoft has only enjoyed it's consumer monopoly for about 10 years of those 40. And they find it hard to transfer that monopoly to other consumer categories. Sony still leads the console market, Symbian leads the mobile market, Media Center and other attempts to grab the set-top market have all shown little sucess in the face of satellite company set-top boxes and Tivos.

        The PC as we envisage it today is certainly not going to be the majority consumer computing platform in 40 years. Probably not even in 10. And it's clear that Microsoft are not a shoe-in to any other category.

        Then the other factor is compatibility and interoperability. Microsoft has built it's monopoly up on limiting compatibility - people buy Microsoft mostly because there is a vast catelog of software out there that only runs on Microsoft OSs. There are going to be a myriad of different consumer device categories used - some of them mentioned above, but the will be more. The consumer is going to expect these all to work together seamlessly. That's only going to happen with open standards, and probably an open and generic programming model too. In such an environment, it's hard for a monopoly to flourish.

    • Re:Preparing for the GNU/world? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @04:14AM (#9295072)
      It seems to me that they are doing this to compensate for the delayed release of Longhorn. Longhorn has already been pushed back to . . . what was it, 2007? I'm sure MS would much rather keep its customers hooked on its old operating systems than see them migrate to a non-Windows OS. This may also be an indicator that we should expect more Longhorn delays.

      I agree that it might be more prudent for MS to shift towards a business model in which they sell support, but do remember that MS is notorious for repackaging one of their current OSes with superficial or pointless alterations and selling it as a new, superior product. WinME is a prime example of this behavior.

      • Re:Preparing for the GNU/world? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by omicronish ( 750174 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @06:27AM (#9295354)

        I agree that it might be more prudent for MS to shift towards a business model in which they sell support, but do remember that MS is notorious for repackaging one of their current OSes with superficial or pointless alterations and selling it as a new, superior product. WinME is a prime example of this behavior.

        Longhorn doesn't seem to be a superficial improvement over Windows XP, however. Sure, the new 3D-accelerated GUI may provide only eye candy, but the underlying APIs and technology involved are completely different from the old GUI API. The same applies with the WinFX framework, which will hopefully be a complete and modern replacement for the old Win32 API, which is quite ugly especially in the UI area.

        Windows Me might've been pointless, but Longhorn provides some real improvements from a developer standpoint. It remains to be seen whether or not this will translate into improvements for the end-user, but I'm sure a lot of coders will be happier with Longhorn.

    • Re:Preparing for the GNU/world? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @04:43AM (#9295133) Homepage
      No. Longhorn is late. That's all.

  • It's about time (Score:2, Interesting)

    by czephyr ( 706389 )
    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.

    • Re:It's about time (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:43AM (#9294986)
      Every time they do something bad its because they are an evil monopoly. Every time they do something good its because they fear linux. I think I'm starting to understand.

    • Re:It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)

      by passthecrackpipe ( 598773 ) * <passthecrackpipe.hotmail@com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:48AM (#9295000)
      The vast majority of the companies I speak to regarding migrating away from MS are primarily driven to do so because of cost and dropped support from MS. The sinbgle biggest driver for a lot of the desktop migrations is dropped support for NT, for example. Linux is scaring them shitless, and this is their reaction. The great thing is, they are reacting rather then being pro-active. MS seems to be on the back-foot for now.
      • Bingo. I'm a Windows guy at this point, but every time a company is forced to change products (for whatever reason, but lack of support is a good one), all alternatives are considered, not just the current vendor.

    • Re:It's about time (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @05:31AM (#9295243)
      It's pretty clear that MS are playing to their strengths here. They've always had solid support for their products (no matter how buggy they might be to begin with). And extending the support just cements that message in the minds of customers and 3rd party vendors.

      This can be contrasted sharply with Linux dists like SuSE or RH. Good luck trying to find a commercial Linux that features some level of free support five years on. A year seems to be your lot in life without paying somebody more money. RH9 may even take the prize for the fastest End Of Lifed commercial OS ever. It must have certainly come as a surprise to those who bought it Near The End that their new OS was practically obsolete. Perhaps OSs should carry an expiry date sticker.

      Naturally, technically competant people can Google for support after the date. But this does nothing to help inexperienced users keep their machines up to date and safe from the latest exploits. Neither does it help enterprises who *must* pay for 24/7 support and for whom the support bill is part of the TCO.

      Even vendors are faced with a dilema when supporting an OS with a short life span. Do they support end of life'd OSs with all the issues that entails, or do they only ever support the latest and greatest and confuse the hell out of their customers? It's hard enough already to ship a driver or a game for Linux and the rapidly moving target makes it nigh impossible to do in a satisfactory manner.

      • M$ having solid support? What planet do you live on? The vast majority of bugs are never fixed, often because they can't be without a full redesign of the trash OS, and of course no-one will dare tell Sir Incompetent Bill that such a thing is necessary.
        • Solid support does not mean fixing the bugs; it means continuing to answer the phone, explain that the problem is known, and telling the customer how to work around it. While you're completely correct that most of Windows doesn't get fixed, and that many of the issues are design flaws, not implementation bugs, this *doesn't matter* to most users of Windows, home or corporate. As long as someone can tell them how to get around the problems, that's good enough. Sad but true.

  • if you know how to browse the web, you would know (Score:5, Informative)

    by atari2600 ( 545988 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:28AM (#9294936)
    Their Business leadership team is here [microsoft.com]

    Their Board of Directors listingis here [microsoft.com] In case those links act up, scroll down using your arrow keys or whatever you use to scroll.

  • Sounds reasonable (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:28AM (#9294937)
    If you can't figure out an OS in 5 years, maybe you should reconsider the whole "computer" thing.

  • The thing about Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by leereyno ( 32197 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:28AM (#9294938) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • The thing you have to remember about Microsoft is that it, like almost any large company, is not monolithic.

      Another characteristic of large companies is that we can do things in 3 months that we cannot do in a year, or two years or five years. Getting things done without a sense of urgency driven from a very senior level is next to impossible, there are so many people involved, each of whom has their own priorities, which may or may not be aligned with the priorities of the organization as a whole. Compan
      • Rarely do we ever see such a sugarcoated description of the hamster-wheel useless nature of jumping through hoops, hurdles, and doing a song and dance to justify our right to exist and earn a living.

        One day we're going to fire the managers and keep the money for ourselves.

        Good job! :)

  • Does this mean (Score:2, Funny)

    by can56 ( 698639 )
    I can run Win98 for another 4 years on my home machine?

    • Re:Does this mean (Score:2, Insightful)

      by atarione ( 601740 )
      god... I guess if you insist.

      however, I **personally** wouldn't want to run win98 for another 4minutes let alone 4 years.

      windows XP really does kick win9x's ass fairly hard in almost every regard I can think of... for that matter win2k kicks win9x's ass also.

      • Re:Does this mean (Score:4, Interesting)

        by paganizer ( 566360 ) <thegrove1&hotmail,com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @04:04AM (#9295048) Homepage Journal
        WinXP...
        DId you know you could be court-martialed for running WinXP on a DOD system up until september of last year?
        then, microsoft offered the gov 498,000 licenses for about $2.00 (i'm not really sure exactly, might be as much as $10) each and the official word from the people in charge of evaluating software changes from !!can not be secured!! to "um, try not to use it in a sensitivity critical environment"
        Great for me as a security contractor, BAD for me as a citizen.
      • Sure XP is better than 98SE. Yet the 98SE has been good enouhgh for the kids' games for several years. I would not want to buy XP's to them only because we cannot get the security fixes.
      • Three words: "Final Fantasy 8." The PC version crashes XP when it tries to play the in-game movies. =\ Since all I want to play is that and TIE Fighter 95 (the only reason I keep windows around at all anymore), Win98 SE it is
    • You can run it for as long as you want, you just have to turn to 3rd-parties for security solutions. Current details say that "Critical security updates will be provided on the Windows Update site through June 30, 2006.", so if a few years are added to that you may still be downloading security patches for 98 from windowsupdate.microsoft.com in 2010.

      Normally I wouldn't care, but as it happens there's a PC on the desk next to me that's running 98SE. After being stored away for almost a year it's been turne

    • Don't you mean "run win98 during 4 years for very short periods of time" ? :)

  • Certainly trumps redhat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:32AM (#9294954) Homepage Journal
    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 .. :)

    • Red Hat supports the enterprise products for more than five years.

    • It's all a balance (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @04:06AM (#9295058)
      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.

      • 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.

        Sure you do. If the OS license is tied to a specific machine, you'll make money as soon as the user finds a reason to replace that old machine. (in practice the license doesn't even need to be tied to the machine, since an old OS won't support newer hardware very well)

        Particularly with PC-based hardware, this tends to be a pretty fast cycle. Extending support in the wa

  • RedHat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blackula ( 584329 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:34AM (#9294963)
    Good for Microsoft. It's nice to see that they don't want to leave their customers out in the cold.

    It's too bad RedHat won't do something similar. They have pitifully short [redhat.com] product lifecycles.

    • Re:RedHat (Score:2, Informative)

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

    • Re:RedHat (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ron_ivi ( 607351 )
      Funny that if I'm using debian/stable I can always get up-to-date patches (at least security related patches) even for that often-maligned-as-"old" version of Linux for years after a release.

    • Exactly what I was going to say. (ob AOL - me too).

      Still, RH seem to be doing everything they can to break their business up these days. Oh well.

      Dave

    • It's too bad RedHat won't do something similar.

      It's too bad they don't have $40 billion in pure cash and still layoff their workers.

    • Re:RedHat (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ediron2 ( 246908 ) *
      Yeah, but:
      • At the end of the product lifecycle, MS leaves you with an .exe; Red Hat's source is published. One of these allows self/mutual support.
      • Do the math: who can *afford* to support stuff longer: divide corporate worth, or cash in the bank or some other metric by the cost per year for support. Now who looks cheap?

      Over the years, I've watched too many vendors tell me that they were revising support *downward* despite earlier promises. It's the first thing I point out when someone slanders Free S

  • Next time. (Score:5, Funny)

    by maelstrom ( 638 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:35AM (#9294968) Homepage Journal
    I didn't know we let Bill Gates post as anonymous coward. That explains a lot actually.

  • Developer tools (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tfbastard ( 782237 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:39AM (#9294977)
    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.

  • Preempting Longhorn with LongWarranty (Score:4, Funny)

    by howman ( 170527 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:45AM (#9294992)
    You just know they forsee needing to support Longhorn for the Longhaul.

  • 11 out of 13 slashdot readers so far... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TapeCutter ( 624760 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @03:51AM (#9295007) Journal
    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.
  • If you think Microsoft is doing this to "be nice" you're being taken for a sucker.

    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

  • Odd.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by digital bath ( 650895 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @04:30AM (#9295106) Homepage
    I have to say kudos to Microsoft on this one.

    You must be new here.

  • Keep users frow switching (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StrayLight ( 30338 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @04:40AM (#9295126) Homepage
    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....
  • 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.
    • Actually, the first really usable modern OS from Microsoft is Windows 2000 Professional.

      Apply Service Pack 4 and all patches since then and Win2K Pro is actually a very stable and usable OS. And unlike Linux, Win2K Pro has driver support out of the wazoo, which means you can use the latest hardware out there pretty easily.
    • Dude, Windows XP is just as bad. Try finding a program you can install and run without administrator priviledges. There are quite a few you can run (i.e. Outlook Express, Microsoft Office), but a lot of ones you can't (TurboTax, The Sims, FAIK every game out there). Windows XP is a step in the right direction, but without the ability to run as a non administrator for a normal user, it's security "features" are worthless.

      Note the italics on non administrator. People are probably going to try and poi

  • kudos? bugs! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by autosepha ( 628157 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @06:03AM (#9295301)
    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.
    • They simple realised that and adjusted support to the longer lifetime that their OSes unfortunately have in the wild.

      What's unfortunate about an OS having a longer lifetime? Aside from being unfortunate for the salesman who would like to sell the user something new, who is hurt by having an OS last as long as the user wants it to?
  • ...Longhorn.

    It would be somewhat amusing if 2K/XP reached EOL and Longhorn would still be "coming right up".

  • That's how it all started (Score:3, Informative)

    by LupeSpywalper ( 713932 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:15AM (#9295490) Journal
    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 think it is a message to corporations; slow to upgrade, fearful of lack of support because of it. This solidifies that.
  • 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.

  • What did they think... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Majestix ( 41486 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:14AM (#9296413)
    ...that everyone was going to upgrade every time they came out with something new? Oh, damn, thats right they did think that.

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