Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it.
We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along.
1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.
Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.
So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.
It's not enough to finish writing the requirements. One of our customers won't touch anything unless 15 years of support is guaranteed. And that's what they get.
Obviously there is a highly domain specific application for our Civil & Structural works last updated 10+ years ago. No one familiar/willing to upgrade it's internal licensing systems to work on newer Windows. So here we go. Whoever needs to work on it, take Remote Desktop. Simple.
But since these guys have now switched to a subscription licensing model, they no longer do that, so there are scattered XP boxen around running ancient versions of various expensive software that just keeps working.
It’s the reason we haven’t adopted the latest replacement. Why bother?
Edit: thanks, it was indeed FPS.
I was in a team that worked on "another" :-). Some of the best memories of my professional life were formed during that period! At launch that was indeed as part of AWS. However it then came under Amazon Payments entity due to legal reasons. Felt sad to see it retired though[1]
GCP comparably has been pretty good to me I n terms of support. But that’s probably because I actually have a support contract with them. (And, I didn’t with Amazon)
I think most people who complain are not /actually/ buying support.
The expectation being that support is baked into the service price. But this isn’t the case with any of the cloud providers as far as I understand.
They would reply. Please see documentation (same link I just sent). After the second or third try I just stopped bothering.
makes me laugh that they think 1 year notice is enough. should be at least 5 for my business to properly consider it.
If everything on a platform is an emergency, that vendor won’t be around in those businesses.
GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support.
> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses
Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.