Unfortunately more OS developers are going the route of “continuous upgrades” with long term support (LTS) while supporting specific hardware models. I’m thinking specifically of iOS on Apple products and more generally of Android on compatible devices. If manufacturers can program to specific hardware platforms, it makes support easier.
Microsoft’s “problem,” if it really is one, is that they are generally platform agnostic. If you can present storage to a device, you can install Windows on it. This has caused Microsoft’s supported software requirements bloat to the point that the OS has grown to 4 GB of compressed operating system goodness while Android and iOS can run on less than 1 GB of available disk. Even Linux can be cherry-picked down to a sleek 250 Mb with some distros.
Hardware is a durable good insomuch as it can be reused, but as operating systems and computing platform requirements improve, older hardware becomes difficult to program to. I can point to Broadcom as a good example of a manufacturer that just cuts off old hardware at the knees and refuses to provide back-channel support to developers. Try getting wireless to work with Linux on a 10 year old laptop, and you’ll find how futile it can be to support older hardware.
Microsoft’s subscription model will be optional, but it’s already in place with products such as Office 365 where most of your Office platform is configured and accessible only through an Internet-enable device. When they start with the old dumb-terminal model where we have a WYSE device in our homes connected to the Internet and presenting everything to us, only then will I agree on the durable good idea, but then there will always be those of us, myself included, who want the horsepower in the home office and not at some distributed data center halfway across the country.
du -h TinyCore32/ 21M TinyCore32/
Takes less than 5 seconds to boot in VMware. It's awesome for troubleshooting, and the distro is amazingly fast even when booting off a thumb drive.
Your comments about Broadcomm are well taken. They suck. Hate their wireless cards, and won't buy anything with their name on it under any circumstances.
I'm just glad that I don't have to be the microsoft treadmill any more. I just don't need the frustration.