[mekender]

Microsoft is indeed a bunch of thugs when it comes to licensing. So is Cisco.

So is VMWare, HP, IBM, Dell, etc...

They all run business models whereby it becomes impractical and expensive to support older software or hardware and they do their best to avoid it. HP made it so that in order to get a firmware update for my home server that would allow me to install Server 2012 on it, I had to pay for a 2 year support agreement.

Windows 10 probably cost well in excess of $10 billion to develop and launch... Why on earth would they continue to sink money into a product that was 3 or 4 generations old and that they were no longer making as much money on?

Hell, you can't even get firmware updates on a 10 year old TV and that sucker cost $1000+... But a $100 OS should be given free updates every month after it is 10 years old?

 

[mekender]

The real bottom line is that they have no income stream after selling you an OS or hardware, so must constantly develop something new to sell you. You won't buy "new" unless they obsolete the prior through developers creating software that doesn't run on your old OS or hardware. It's really about software development keeping your old shit too old. Business is about upgrades.

But MS does not by and large create software that would motivate such rolling upgrades... At least if we are talking about the PC... They make Office, but there are alternatives if you decide not to but that.

The key is, in my eyes, that older software becomes increasingly insecure as time goes on and the cost of securing it becomes higher and higher...

Additionally, the capabilities of hardware increases as time goes on and by necessity, software has to change in order to take advantage of that new hardware. This necessarily creates a cost-benefit decision point... Do you as the CFO of a software development company spend your finite resources to make sure your software works on machines that are 10 years old, or do you develop it to take advantage of new machines that will be bought by the millions over the next few years? If you are making a database analytic program, you do both with a bit of focus on the older since many of your users will indeed be using older hardware... If you are making a fluid dynamics simulation software, you will probably focus on newer hardware since the people that are buying your software are not going to be very likely to get hung up on the cost of buying an upper end machine.

And with hardware increasingly becoming a disposable asset over the years, it is not a surprise that the software is viewed as the same thing... Your average consumer PC has an expected life span of 1 to 2 years, why on earth would someone expect that 8 years later, people should get free service for such machines?

It is no different than with small appliances... Try to find a place that can repair your 10 year old DVD player... Or your 8 year old coffee maker...

 

[mekender]

It's the enterprise level licensing that is mind boggling. Cisco, Microsoft and everyone else...it is getting ridiculous. I have 2 of 3 Cisco UCS boxes going EOL that aren't even old enough to have dust on them. I have no choice but to replace them or technically forfeit support on the entire cluster.

Luckily, Cisco has such a convoluted licensing program that even their own people get confused. Infinite matrices with pages and pages of footnotes and caveats.

I worked a contract last year, our initiative would have eliminated some $600k a year in Citrix Licensing costs by using a competing Microsoft product...

 

[mekender]

Linux FTW. Middle of the road i5 laptop with a 250g SSD. Boot time from power off to usable desktop is right around 20 seconds.

Sounds slow... But then I go from power off to desktop in about 5 seconds and that includes typing the password and it logging into the domain (I have a domain in my house).