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The article is correctThe article is correctPosted Apr 2, 2012 10:19 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: The article is correct by epa Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
I'd much rather one big upgrade every ten years than a steady churn where things stop working at unpredictable intervals. The fact that Windows XP has been around so long is really an accident. If it was up to Microsoft we'd all upgrade our machines every 3 years or so (consider Windows 95 – 98 – ME – XP – …). The problem with that was that Vista was delayed by a few years and – once it was there – it was so abysmally bad that when asked to upgrade, many people flipped MS the bird. Hence XP had a much longer lease on life than was originally intended, people have become used to it more than they were supposed to in the first place, and many are reluctant to upgrade to Windows 7 even now because they fail to see the point. In principle, Linux is at an advantage here because with most distributions upgrades are free, and with many they are pretty seamless. The main problem is really ABI churn, which we have people like the GNOME and KDE developers to blame for.
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The article is correct Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:00 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
>The fact that Windows XP has been around so long is really an accident. If it was up to Microsoft we'd all upgrade our machines every 3 years or so (consider Windows 95 – 98 – ME – XP – …). The problem with that was that Vista was delayed by a few years and – once it was there – it was so abysmally bad that when asked to upgrade, many people flipped MS the bird.
Microsoft's fondest wish is that everyone pays them money every year for nothing. The fact that MS wants a 3-year cycle and that XP's long life is a mistake don't matter, what matters is that, for the majority of people, there have been *two* operating systems: Windows 98 and Windows XP.
The first one most people used for 3-5 years, the latter one for 5-10 years. This is what people want, a *minimum* of 3 years of stability and 10 years is better. Nothing which breaks every 12 (or 6!) months will work.
The article is correct Posted Apr 2, 2012 14:44 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>If it was up to Microsoft we'd all upgrade our machines every 3 years or so (consider Windows 95 – 98 – ME – XP – …). The problem with that was that Vista was delayed by a few years and – once it was there – it was so abysmally bad that when asked to upgrade, many people flipped MS the bird.
A lot of companies use the 'Microsoft Software Assurance' program to get updates for all Microsoft software. So companies pay a small sum per user each year to get all the updates don't worrying about future upgrade costs.
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