It’s like a broken record with the “I’m proud to never upgrade people.
No, Microsoft is not obligated to support an 14 year old OS because a group of people have skirted by for years on old software.
No, you aren’t saving money by running old software for you business on them. At some point you will have to buy a new machine, or lack workers that will be able to work efficiently on a machine that still has a floppy drive. Unless you are some hole in the wall shop or are too broke to ever upgrade, you are setting yourself up for major pain.
And no, XP doesn’t represent the pinnacle of OS development just because you like the way it finds files on your PC. At some point XP was new and was the replacement for OSs that people swore were perfect too.
Do people seriously think that the big companies should do nothing with their product just to spare a dwindling number of people the horror of having to upgrade an OS that is itself an upgrade?
> No, Microsoft is not obligated to support an 14 year old OS because a group of people have skirted by for years on old software
Hell, I think they had every right to pull support after 8 years, if they had come out with a viable replacement OS in time. Vista was not that OS, and Microsoft stepped on their own dong by bringing it out too late and too broken. Mistakes happen.
Had they released something like Win7 in 2004 or 2005, people would have accepted the newer UI and so forth, and today nobody would still be using XP.
So MS screwed up and as a result people kept using XP for many additional years, to the point where they started thinking of it as "The last operating system you'll ever need to buy." Wrong, Bucko.
I keep my cars on the road for at least 10, sometimes 15 years. But roads and traffic patterns don't change nearly as rapidly as computers, software, and networks. A 15 year old car in good shape will work just fine on today's roads. And tomorrow's roads.
Users have to realize that computers and operating systems ain't like cars. Or Maytag washing machines.
They're getting to the point where the hardware is useless after 5 years. Is it any surprise that the operating system becomes obsolete after 5 years too?