The traditional way to fund maintenance was to release a new and better version of the product. Example, all the releases of the various office suites from the days of MS-DOS up to Windows up to the cloud. If sales decline, sell to a competitor (good timing required) or close and switch to something else. A company that paid salaries for 5-10 years is still nothing to be ashamed of.

In the case of Apple, keep selling new hardware. I can't remember if they ever sold their software in the first years of Macs or if it was bundled with the hardware.

> I can't remember if they ever sold their software in the first years of Macs or if it was bundled with the hardware.

In the early OSX era they used to sell their office suite separately. Eventually it got bundled with hardware for free. They still sell some software, like Final Cut Pro.

Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine, which received literally zero 'maintenance' for at least a decade or more depending on personal preferences.

For most software that can be sold in a box, without an attached cloud service, this approach works.

EDIT: Also some fraction would be using them on computers that literally haven't been upgraded or connected to the internet for a decade or more.

Microsoft also makes Windows, and Windows takes backwards compatibility very seriously.

Even if they don't work on maintaining Office 2003 directly, they indirectly work very hard making sure every subsequent version of Windows does not break Office 2003.

No, they are perfectly usable and functional even on Windows XP or Vista or 7 computers that haven't been touched or connected to the internet since 2012.

That's not backward compatibility then - those are the systems it was made for (Windows 7 would then have been made backwards compatible for Office 2003).

It's backward compatibility if Word 2003 runs on the later Windows versions - like Windows 10 and 11. I don't know the answer to that, but I'm sure someone here does.

Oh, I wasn't responding to the first point, of course Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously.

Though it's possible to mix and match so the OS backwards compatibility isn't the full story.

i.e. a launch copy of Word 2003 works on later OS updates, yet the final patch version of Word 2003 also works on a 2009 launch copy of 7.

It is amusing that your argument for software not needing “maintenance” is pointing out 3 pieces of software that had each received 20 years of maintenance by the time they reached the year you picked, 2003.

I've edited my comment since it appears your the third person confused as to the possibility of using them on older computers.

I think you are confused because the 2003 version of those products had already had as many as 20 years of maintenance, in the form of prior releases upon which they were based. Word was first released in 1983 and Excel in 1985.

The 1985 version of Excel was Mac only. The 2003 version is about as closely related as iOS is to Mac System 7.

If you don't understand Excel's history, it's better to not make such a bizarre claim.

Did the development of Excel 2003 not benefit from all of the work done in the previous versions? Even if it had been a from-scratch rewrite, which it was not, it would have still benefited from the design iteration and experience of the development team in solving the same problems in previous versions. Excel 2003 was not a first-release that was suddenly a refined product that would be useful for years without additional maintenance. I used Excel a few times in the 80s, and regularly through the 90s and early 2000s on Macs and Windows and wrote quite a bit of VBA for them professionally.

What part of my claim is bizarre? My claim is simply that Word and Excel had 20 years of history prior to the 2003 release. Your claim that it was originally written on a different OS is not really a reasonable counter-argument. The Windows version of Excel came out 2 years after the Mac version, so that only knocks the history of the "Windows" version down to 16 years.

By the same logic someone could claim that 1985 Excel was in fact based on the preceding 20 years of mainframe and minicomputer software and the very first spreadsheet-esque programs.

And that those were in turn based on the ideas of Von Neuman & co. from 1945 of tabulating numbers efficiently, and so on and so forth in roughly equivalent leaps all the way back to the first abacus.

It's so reductive of a perspective that it's self-defeating, since no human being, including you, could ever actually comprehend the entirety of technological development, or even just the post-1945 developments.

No human being except you, apparently.

I think it is a pretty clear line between attributing the quality of a piece of software to two decades of prior development at the same company, with its own continuity of developers and institutional knowledge, as opposed to the general benefits all software gains from the industry advances it builds upon.

No it's not a clear line at all. In fact Lotus 1-2-3 was literally the direct predecessor from IBM in terms of everything but the brand name and some design choices.

It was also selling for 20 years. Its the same with physicall products if it sels u will update and maintain the product.

Funny you mentioned 2003 since that's the exact version Ms Office I use ;)

if you think those aren't receiving maintenance you're not paying attention or are ignorant as to how hard it is to keep a complex app compiling as operating systems move forward.

Not receiving new features is VERY different from not receiving maintenance. It is wholly implausible to believe that there has been zero energy spent on keeping those codebases working in the past 10 years.

I don't think you understand. Office 2003 (or earlier) and similar products aren't constantly phoning home for updates like more recent software. Millions of people have had a single 100% static binary for these programs running on their computer for many years. The ability to phone home, if it exists at all, may even be broken or disabled.

This is in fact how all software worked until, I don't know, about two decades ago? Things being patched was a big deal, a voluntary manual process, and didn't happen often. The update would even have a well-known name like "Service Pack 2".

The idea that all software must be constantly maintained is recent and the assumption that it is necessary is mostly self-imposed by the software business. Users don't share this assumption, and in fact on many products, updates are viewed mostly neutral to negatively, other than perhaps critical security updates on products that are used in connection to the internet or untrusted data.

Single static binary software, the blessed future we never saw.

As beautiful as it is, and for the all the problems dynamic linking causes, the edges on single static binary software are very, very sharp.

I'm not sure what to say to this... you can just buy an old copy of Office 2003 on eBay, an old Windows XP computer, and boot it up and try it out?

You don't have to believe me, I imagine practically every reader on HN has the means to verify this for themselves.

Sure you can do that. But look at the list of 60 vulnerabilities with score 9+ that you're exposing yourself to:

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

So you can try it out but don't open any documents, or run it while connected to the net. You'd better also not insert any images. Have fun!

We could also have a post "World where bad people don't try to break your software"

You answered your own issues. Dont open untrusted documents from the net. not running while connected to the net seems mute as the software doesnt directly access the internet. Seems like issues even the most up to date software suffers from.

That kind of rethoric doesn't fly too far... Your original point was

> Plenty of people are using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine

Are you claiming that a reasonable majority (for the sake of discussion) of this plenty of people are using Office 2003 on Windows XP machines??

I'd doubt it. More like there's plenty of people using old software in modern versions of Windows. The maintenance work, of course, exists and has been done indirectly, by Microsoft, in the development iterations of Windows itself.

If you also include Windows 2000, Vista, and 7 computers that weren't updated in the last decade, I think that would be a sizeable fraction of all Office 2003 users in 2023.

Whether or not they make up the numerical majority of all extant users is simply irrelevant to the point of 'Plenty of people'. It's easily many, many, thousands.

Support for Office 2003 ended in 2014. Close to a decade ago. No maintenance, no patches, no service packs, nothing. No energy expended working on that codebase.

Office 2016 is going EOL in two years.

That's from Microsoft themselves. They do not hide these facts or make it hard to find.

And?

I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text processors have to be continually updated for decades. Just program it right once for god sakes.

You vastly underestimate the complexity involved. Also, new attacks get discovered that were not even dreamed 20 years ago. There is no "just get it right" when right is measured by what we know, and that keeps changing.

* * *

Unlike recent versions of Office, old ones didn't call home, and Microsoft doesn't really have an idea of how many copies of their software are still in use in some cases.

> Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine

Unless they're also using computers and OSes from 2003 (spoiler -- they're not because those OSes wouldn't work with today's internet), those people are benefiting from untold efforts in the meantime to maintain their OS so it has that compatibility with 20 year old user space code.

I have a Pentium 4 machine running Win XP in regular operation since 2003. I use it to create content in CorelDRAW 11 and AutoCAD 2004.

That sweet sensation of being owner of what you paid for comes as a bonus.

Somebody has to maintain the software, be it the devs or the end users.

Completely agree.

Nowadays, software is different from the CD era, where you bought a game/software and that was it. Nowadays, people expect the software to be maintained, kept up to date and always compatible with the latest changes (new OS versions, compatibility with other software, etc.).

Maintenance is the high cost of software, not building it. This is why I sell my products with a perpetual license but with paid yearly updates. I can not work for free indefinitely as all the "lifetime" licenses promise.

I think there are a few interesting threads to pick at here.

First, some of these problems are created by software developers themselves. In particular, shoving in an online component where one doesn't need to exist basically guarantees that you will have recurring costs and the need for constant maintenance.

Second, Microsoft is much more careful about maintaining backwards compatibility than Apple. I can generally fire up 10+ year old software on Windows 10, no problem. The same is sometimes true on OSX/iOS, but often not. The increasing popularity of Apple products and the lower priority they place on backwards compatibility has definitely made developers' lives harder.

Having said all that, I don't think everybody expects constant updates. I think power users, especially, are used to running what works for them for long periods of time. You probably can't build the next Google on this, but a lifestyle business? Certainly. Just look at Pinboard and it's lack of enhancements or UI overhauls - and that's an online service.

An excellent product doesn't need maintenance if it doesn't rely on any online services. Once it's done, it's done. It does everything it needs and nothing it doesn't need.

Engineering projects usually have a finished state. Software engineering is no different, no matter how much the industry wants you to believe otherwise.

Software engineering is like if a car was built and thus "finished", but the systems it depends on (like roads, and gas stations) changed every N years (with N < 10).

Imagine the gas stations (operating system) changed the kind of fuel they dispense every few years. No, by no means a car (software) that is fully finished today would be able to continue doing its thing tomorrow, without ongoing updates.

This also happens in the real world, it's just that changes are more likely in the decades or centuries, so we as humans don't perceive them so well.

The fact that Microsoft spends a whole lot of money to avoid this, is circumstantial. Apple doesn't so much, and at some point your finished software will stop working with newer MacOS releases if you don't update it to the newer system versions.

Linux is even more of a moving target. Good luck having a perfectly well working compiled program today, and trying to run it in 10 years time.

Is there any reason — other than "we're paying our graphic designers full-time salaries so we better get our money's worth" — why OSes have to change so drastically and can't be finished as well, only ever updated to add new APIs for apps and drivers to support new hardware features?

Security is probably the biggest reason. With attacks growing continually more sophisticated, it’s not enough to just patch holes as they’re found — you have to engineer entirely new systems to not be drowned in holes. This unfortunately has compatibility implications.

Look at macOS for example, which over the years has gained app sandboxing and mobile-like access permissions. Software pre-dating these additions that assumes that it has access to everything all the time will have its functionality impaired. Devs had to update their software to not make such huge assumptions and to handle no access cases gracefully.

So, how secure is "secure enough"? Android's security model is okay, and Google knows it, so they just keep redesigning the UI without substantial API changes because the updates have to be coming out with each lap the planet makes around its star.

> Devs had to update their software to not make such huge assumptions and to handle no access cases gracefully.

Sure. But at some point it will reach the "secure enough" state, won't it?

(Actually, macOS permissions work mostly transparently API-wise. Apps can request access explicitly so it better fits their particular UX, but the prompt would also pop up the first time the protected resource is accessed. No code-level changes are necessary to support this.)

> Android's security model is okay, and Google knows it, so they just keep redesigning the UI without substantial API changes because the updates have to be coming out with each lap the planet makes around its star.

Google is a bit of a special case I think due to their culture of using big projects as a means of climbing the corporate ladder. The only thing that could ever possibly result from that is endless churn.

> Sure. But at some point it will reach the "secure enough" state, won't it?

Maybe, I’m too much of a layman in the field of infosec to be able to say.

> (Actually, macOS permissions work mostly transparently API-wise. Apps can request access explicitly so it better fits their particular UX, but the prompt would also pop up the first time the protected resource is accessed)

True, but it’s still problematic if e.g. the user accidentally denies access unknowingly, which will result in the app producing seemingly nonsensical errors. For a good user experience the app needs to be able to tell the user what the real problem is.

The program's interface with environment won't change forever, when you write your program as a pure function which only touches exactly the thing it fundamentally needs to, you use a pretty much finalized interface.

> only ever updated to add new APIs for apps and drivers to support new hardware features

Sounds like it's not "finished" if it needs all these updates.

As for why change the window dressing, the market for style changes over time. Why do car companies change the look of their products? Why does the outside of a cereal box ever change? Do the inside of our houses today look the same as the 80s? The 70s? The 40s?

Are you arguing that Windows and MacOS should continue to look like it's 1.0 release?

> As for why change the window dressing, the market for style changes over time.

Software is a tool, a means to an end. It doesn't need to participate in fashion.

> Are you arguing that Windows and MacOS should continue to look like it's 1.0 release?

Yes. It should remain an option at least. Not the literal "1.0", but the version when a decent UX was figured out. For Windows in particular, that's clearly 95. I know people who used the "classic" theme in Windows 7 and earlier, which remained mostly unchanged from Windows 95, and are resentful of its removal in subsequent versions that they have to use in order to have support for modern hardware.

> that's clearly 95

I wouldn't say that's very clear. There were still lots of refinements and redesign that happened as Windows started becoming more of a multi-user OS with NT and later XP. Just because there was a classic skin in 7 doesn't mean it was the same UX. Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI.

Maybe you find 95 to be the end-all be-all of design, but many don't. UI, and to an extent UX, is partially subjective and then also very different based on the user. Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine, would they consider it the peak of OS UI/UX design?

And as the product's target market evolves and changes so too should the software for what customers expect. Which brings me to...

> Software is a tool, a means to an end. It doesn't need to participate in fashion.

One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house. A house is just a tool, something to keep the environment consistent and shelter from the elements. A couch is just a tool to support a sitting human being. It doesn't need to participate in fashion. And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.

Any piece software competes in a market of software. Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets. One looks like an ancient Java Swing UI and has bad colors and overall just looks ugly, meanwhile the other looks nice and pleasing (insert your own ideas of "nice and pleasing" here). One is probably going to hemorrhage users over time, can you imagine which?

> Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI.

The windows themselves, the taskbar and the desktop all worked the same in 7 as they did in 95. Many of the changes made over that time came with settings to revert them — like that new thicc taskbar with icon-only buttons and window grouping.

> Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine

I'm sick of perfectly good desktop UIs getting redesigns which are compromised by the existence of iPads and other touchscreen devices. This just should not happen, period. Windows 95 UI is straightforward enough once you get the basic principles, which takes all of one hour of poking around. Microsoft didn't conduct all that research for nothing, after all.

What frustrated people about Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) when it was current wasn't the UI. The UI was nice. It was the inherent instability of the system itself due to its architecture. Same for classic Mac OS, it doesn't matter how nice your UI is if the system itself can be trivially crashed or locked up by a single misbehaving app because of cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.

> One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house.

All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same. You know a bed when you see one.

All buttons and text fields and window titles used to also look largely the same and everyone was fine with that. But then the plague of flat design happened.

Imagine being exhausted after a long flight, walking into your hotel room only to see white, textureless walls, floor, and ceiling, and multiple white textureless blocks of different sizes inside. You get to figure out which one is a bed, which one is a chair, which one is a toilet, and which one is a sink! How exciting! This is what modern affordance-less UIs feel like. A good tool shows how it's meant to be used by its form.

> And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.

That same classic Windows theme was extremely customizable for that very reason. You could change all colors and fonts to your liking, and some people did! You could make yourself a dark theme way before dark themes became mainstream.

> Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets.

You mean the control skins are the only thing different between them, otherwise all UI/UX being identical down to the layouts?

> All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same.

It's almost like you've never been in a furniture store. They come in tons of different sizes, shapes, textures, colors, features, and more. There's not just a single couch model that you can then change the color on.

> The UI was nice.

I highly disagree. The taskbar would get filled up quickly and get squished for me since there was no grouping. The notification tray couldn't hide things. No virtual desktop support. The start menu was incredibly basic in form. No search from the start menu. Editing the start menu programs list was extremely non-obvious and not self explained. Navigating the nested start menu shortcuts was a huge pain. Installers just threw everything in the start menu leading to a ton of clutter. UI elements are miserable at scaling, in that there is zero scaling support. The taskbar was only on your primary display. Difficult to change default sound output device straight from the taskbar. No central place to see previous notifications. No jumplists. No Win+Number shortcuts to quickly swap between things on the taskbar. Alt+Tab prompt doesn't have window previews. I could go on and on and on and on and on about what I perceive to be massive failures of 95's UI/UX.

I didn't really care for the overall icon design throughout the OS and generally see the overall style in the OS as pretty basic, bland, and boring. Changing the color or setting the title bar font to Comic Sans isn't solving that.

In the end though, you probably disagree with a lot of these things. I think your couch is ugly and uncomfortable, and you probably think my couch is ugly and uncomfortable. UI/UX has some subjectivity involved. Not everyone agrees 95 was the ultimate software design unable to be improved upon.

Completely incorrect.

Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change.

Dependencies break.

Security updates.

Etc.

Engineering projects usually hand off maintenance to their owner. Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance.

The difference with software is that maintenance is done by the producers as they own the code.

> Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change.

OSes also can be "excellent products". They don't need yearly updates, there's nothing inherent to them that would prevent them from being made perfect, finished and never updated again.

The only case when an otherwise perfect OS would truly need to update is when new hardware capabilities require OS-level changes to support. Sometimes it may be beneficial to expose these new hardware capabilities as APIs for apps to consume. But again, adding new APIs shouldn't break the existing ones. For example, on phones, this would include things like notched screens, fingerprint readers or multiple rear-facing cameras.

> Dependencies break.

Don't update dependencies. Pick one version that serves you well and stick with it forever. I'm serious.

> Security updates.

It seems like we've already realized that writing code that deals with complex data structures received from untrusted parties in memory-unsafe languages like C is a terrible idea. If you exclude memory safety vulnerabilities, the attack surface shrinks drastically. You'd run out of security vulnerabilities pretty fast if you'd have any to begin with.

> Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance.

Houses, cars, and road infrastructure are made out of atoms and exposed to elements and stress of our imperfect real world. They wear out. Code doesn't. In 100 years, the bits would be the same they are today (as long as you use a reliable enough storage medium).

This all sounds fine hypothetically, you might want to take a look around at the world for a while to see why it doesn't fit your model. Obviously your idea hasn't happened, and there's good reasons why this is the case that you could readily discover if you took a look at reality instead of your model of reality.

> there's nothing inherent to them that would prevent them from being made perfect, finished and never updated again.

theres this thing called the internet, to which the OS connects, filled with adversarial actors, so no this is not correct at all

And? How do updates help any of this? Firewalls are a thing. Memory-safe languages are a thing. And it is not an OS's job to protect the user from themselves (i.e. social engineering). If you've installed malware, you deserve the consequences and you will be more careful next time. It's okay for powerful technologies to require a minimum level of education.

> this is not correct at all

Why?

There's a thing called formal verification of software.

I'd rather use an imperfect product that does a good-enough job instead of waiting for a perfect product.

The perfect OS doesn't exist yet. Right now, I'd rather use some OS than no OS.

Why a perfect OS doesn't exist? Good question. Maybe because the programming field is relatively immature so we're still figuring things out and we don't apply formal verification to everything. Compare that to say, architecture, where we can calculate how much weight a structure can withstand. Or the other way around: what do we need to do to support an X amount of load.

I guess the stakes are lower too. I wouldn't walk on a wobbly bridge, but I don't mind if a desktop app I use crashes occasionally under unusual circumstances. Critical software (say, aviation) is generally written with more care but it's still not perfect.

Engineering projects have a finished state? So once they build a road or bridge or dam, nobody needs to touch it again forever? It's finished right, no more work anymore.

Even in electronic hardware there's often continuation of design and refinement. Have you never seen a board with a revision number on it?

> It's finished right, no more work anymore.

Real-world objects like these wear out. Code doesn't.

> Have you never seen a board with a revision number on it?

Of course I have. There's a difference though. You can't ship an electronic device that's unfinished with a promise to "fix it later". Yet this is what routinely happens with software these days. Also, if your device serves its purpose well, you'd probably have a "final" board revision with all flaws fixed. If you want to add features to an electronic device, you'd make it a different model, possibly sold concurrently with your existing one to serve people with different needs and budgets.

> Real-world objects like these wear out

You just said "engineering". Bridges and roads are engineering as well buddy.

> Engineering projects usually have a finished state

This is the statement I'm addressing. And it's just not entirely accurate. Things change, assumptions get proven wrong, there's always a newer and better way to do something, etc.

Sure your widget was probably about as good as you could do at the time you first launched it, but several years later there's better components available. Or maybe a supplier stops making some part you were using. Or a few years later you start getting parts back failing early in their service life and need to make an update. What was once your finished state now isn't.

Uh, look at curl. It is an excellent product, no doubt about it (or if you do, I wonder what your standards for excellence are), and yet we are here, at version 8.0, 27 years after its first release.

Edit:

"if it doesn't rely on any online services"

That is a big IF. How many things don't, at least indirectly? (e.g. by relying on HTTPS, which requires TLS, which requires keeping up with current cryptographic standards.)

If cryptography can't possibly be figured out once and for all and must remain a moving target forever, I'd separate TLS into a module that can be updated independently of the rest of the system.