No one is forcing Gul to buy anything. He can still use Windows XP. Microsoft will just no longer help him if something goes wrong. Does the owner of a 1965 Mustang still go to Ford for parts and warranty work? No. No they don't.
I have Windows 7. Can't really tell the difference between it and XP other then the layout on somethings. They could have easily called it Windows XP 2.0.
Doesn't quite work. The owner of the '65 Mustang can still buy new parts for his car, from either manufacturers authorized by Ford (who're using either the original dies, or blueprints) or from Ford itself. And since Windows 8 contains code found in Windows XP, this means that often times a security flaw found in Windows 8, will also exist in versions back to XP (or even earlier). Presumably MS has automated tools for final coding of patching, so that they write it once, and it exports it to the various versions of Windows and then pushes it out to users. This would mean that the effort to keep XP up to date isn't extremely onerous (though there will be times I'm sure, when engineers have to do a lot of detailed hand coding for each version). If MS wanted to, they could license a partner to handle maintaining XP for individuals who wanted (or needed) to keep running XP. Sort of like how a couple of Studebaker dealers bought the rights to the Avanti, and continued to build the cars for years after Studebaker went bankrupt.
The aftermarket support industry for older cars generates billions of dollars a year, current IP laws prevent the same thing from happening in the tech world. Which is a problem. Where I work, we have a PC running Windows 95, because we have data in a program that was written by a company no longer in business. It is not cost-effective for us to pay someone to extract the data and convert it into a program that's being used on current versions of Windows. So, we nurse the old PC along, and I know that there are a number of other companies who do the same thing with different programs. If it were mandated that companies who were no longer going to support a program had to open source it and release the source code, then we would have an easier time dumping that old software and moving to something more modern.
A friend of mine is in that same predicament. He's a piano tuner, and most of the software of his trade is Windows 95 based. He can run it on XP through "compatibility mode", but he's stuck at XP between that and the fact that he's 88 years old and is convinced that he can't learn Windows 7 or later.
Win7 is extremely similar to XP. If you can use the latter, you can use the former -- if you're not attentive to detail, you might not even notice the switch.
Who's forcing anyone to do something? Fact is, it's 13 years old and there have been three new versions since then. They have already extended the support cycle because it just won't die already (we still have it at work!) But that's the internet I guess. New? BAD! Not new? BAD! They just can't win except they are Apple and make the worldwide media dance like their good bitches. Indeed. But they probably don't start every new Windows from scratch so they'd be open sourcing pretty much their whole cash cow.
When Microsoft gives it away for free, like the Adobe upgrades, instead of saying "Sorry, suckers, you've got to pay $xxx for the New&Improved model or you're SOL," then the element of coercion will be removed. Planned obsolescence on something physical like a car or a fridge that actually wears out is one thing. But software that "wears out"? Bullshit.
It only wears out in the sense that new updates protect it against newly developed malware (or more rarely, adapt it to newly developed plug-in software and hardware). That's something that has to be done actively, and I don't see why Microsoft should do so for free indefinitely. It's fair to say the quality of their service depends on how long they'll keep their OS versions going, but that's all it is: Better or worse service.
It's not obsolete, you're perfectly welcome to run it, I just wouldn't advise connecting it to the internet. Also, cars or fridges are very poor examples, since you don't run smaller cars inside of cars.
Software eventually gets to the point where the processors (the physical part, the computer's "brain") have changed so much that the old software can't run on it. For example, the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit processors. My old G5, purchased in 2004, can't run current versions of Flash or even the last couple generations of OS-X. As old processors are phased out of the market, there's no need to support the old software any more.
Yeah, but it can also be argued that there is no need for the new system architecture for a majority of users. It's a pity those users are forced to upgrade for the sake of enhancements they don't require.
Adobe makes money (or tries to, and struggles) because their free software spreads a standard that their commercial software creates and manipulates. Firefox is essentially a charity; I love it, but you can't chastise an organisation for not being a charity.
True, gul, but . . . new systems mean faster, greater capacity, more memory . . . and at lower cost and greater efficiency.
Uh, what? I really wish you luck in getting a free upgrade for the vast majority of Adobe products. Ask for a free upgrade to the new version Photoshop or Illustrator, and watch them roar with laughter. And yes, they do stop supporting old versions too. It doesn't wear out, it just stops getting supported. If you want a good example of why things need upgrading, just keep watching the banks. They're hot on bonuses, but not so hot on keeping IT talent. Well, at least until things stop working, which is starting to happen at a few. Guess maybe if they'd invested in new systems...
I've also got to say, after having to use XP for the last 3 months at work (the NHS and IT are a bit like Laurel and Hardy), I cannot wait for it to die. It was fine for it's time, but doing stuff on it now is painful. And painfully slow.
Maybe if you are programming or doing 'techy stuff' with it that I won't even begin to comprehend. But to the average punter who is doing their jobs or just sitting at home using a home PC, all they see is the front end and window's explorer. I would suggest that MS can rip out the engine and put a whole new operating system 'under the hood', but if they left the customer facing front end the same and consistent, we wouldn't see anywhere near as much reactions. I actually thought office 2003 > whatever the big upgrade was, was a much bigger jump than XP -Win7. IMO
I ran a W2K box until 2010, when the hardware failed. If the hardware hadn't crapped out, I'd likely still be running it. I had a drive error with my XP laptop that prevented booting. I don't know if I ever made a recovery disk. If I did, I couldn't find it. And since it was a laptop, I didn't have any XP install disks. If I ever get bored, there's a good chance of me installing W2K on that machine. I could do Linux, but that fad is kind of dying out and I don't think I'll ever have that much free time on my hands. Seriously, not having support from Microsoft for XP isn't that big a deal. A bigger deal is when you start having to find software that will run on XP. By the time my desktop died, that was getting to be a challenge with W2K.
Windows 7 is the shit. I was a die-hard XP user so when my previous computer bit the dust about three years ago I was reluctant to switch over to Window 7. Boy, was I glad I did. Much better than XP. I've played around with Windows 8 and there's no fucking way anyone should upgrade to that mess. People thought Vista was bad. They clearly never met Windows 8.
Really? What's so bad about Win8? I've tried it out a little bit and din't hit any walls, but my experience with it is limited to one week on a borrowed laptop.
That's what I think of your problem. #1 Hack it yourselves. Can you be sued? Not unless you foolishly go bragging about it. #2 Hire someone to move the data. Even if it's not cost effective it's a one time thing. Stop complaining about it.
For me, it's more about Windows 8 than the latest updates. When Windows 8 came out, it was a mess. The user interface is non-intuitive, and in many cases it took several more steps to do the same action you could do in Windows 7. The OS itself was made for only one platform, mobile devices, even though there are far more laptop/desktop users than Windows mobile device users. User options were more limited in favor of streamlining the whole OS, it was absurd. They did the same thing during the transition from XP to Vista. It was style over substance. When they finally corrected the error with Windows 7, they went and fucked it up again with 8 by emphasizing style over substance. They've finally patched a number of things to where desktop users have a better experience with 8, but that should have never been the case. How do you see Windows 7 wiping the floor with everything else, and becoming wildly popular, only to say "Hey, see what we did there? Let's not do that again!" and fuck it all up?
Spoken like someone who has no idea of what's going on. "Hack it yourselves"? Yeah, no. We don't have anybody on staff who does computer programming who could reverse engineer the program to find out the data. Which means we'd have to hire somebody. That's expensive, unless you outsource it to India, but I don't think the boss would agree to such a thing, so there's no point in even bringing it up. "Hire someone to move the data." They would not only have to move the data for us, but also for our client who uses the software as well, and given that they don't want to chip in to pay for it, and that said costs would probably be in the tens of thousands of dollars (since there'd need to be new software written as well), thus wiping out our profits for any jobs we did for that particular customer, while keeping the old PC wheezing along costs nothing by comparison, it doesn't really make much sense to shell out the money. FYI, I've worked at Fortune 500 companies that have a similar attitude, so its not like this is something unique to small businesses. "Stop complaining about it." I'm not complaining about it, but merely commenting. That you can't tell the difference is your problem, not mine. When the PC dies, we'll no doubt image the data into a virtual machine and run it that way.
"When the PC dies, we'll no doubt image the data into a virtual machine and run it that way." Should have already been done. And it's time to get a new customer.
This is a side bar but professionally I've had the worst of both worlds happen to me. In my industry Leica makes the best damned equipment bar non. What they have done with their latest equipment is designed it so that it works like an iPhone and will only work with Bluetooth 4.0 devices (Windows 8, Android, and iOS). Speaking with their engineers they said they were tired of being behind the curve and wanted to be known for bleeding edge. That's all fine and well except that by doing so they have having an industry wide negative impact. Work flow efficiency had dropped by about 50% for everyone in the industry and we are now all supposed to make major infrastructure changes? I and several other companies have told them to go fuck themselves and we'll be buying shit on ebay for as long as that will last. Supposedly we've caused enough of a confab that they're flying over from Switzerland in a few weeks to interview us to see what they should be doing. Sorry for the side bar but this one has me uber pissed off. It's a case of dumbassed engineers who don't live in the real world making decisions that affect that reality.
Its not my job. What makes you think they're our only customer? The beauty of nursing our system along is that if theirs blows up and they can't recover the data and have to make the jump to a more modern system, they have to eat the costs involved with upgrading their system and ours. Currently, it costs us next to nothing to keep the Win95 PC going, other than electricity, and it allows us to undercut the competition for the job, since not too many shops are going to have copies of that particular program running (even if they do have a Win95 machine, which many shops probably do), as if they try to take their business somewhere else, they're going to have to spend big chunks of money upgrading their systems to something newer.
