>>>>>>>>It's wrong. Flatly wrong. It's an agenda, not a service response.
>>>>>>Almost everybody here would have known....
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>It is why I hate Microsoft, and everything they stand for.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>How much did you pay for XP in the first place? Not more than $400, probably a lot less. Why should Microsoft be obliged to provide fixes forever for a cheap product? Does your car manufacturer fix your car for free? If your refrigerator breaks down after 12 years, will the manufacturer or the folks you bought it from fix it for free? It's only in the computer world that we expect stuff to be fixed for free for years and years.
>>>>
>>>>Tamar
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>>>
>>>I think Microsoft should offer to charge a certain amount for ongoing Windows XP maintenance, as this relates to ongoing labor. But it should not be a lot given the large user base which, when distributed among them, would be only a few dollars per year each (if that).
>>>
>>>This is the part you don't get, Tamar: software is different than other things, such as repairing cars. Each car must be fixed individually by a hands-on effort. Software does not require such a thing. Once you've made one working copy with software, everyone on the entire planet can get a copy and use it using nothing more than the effort required to download through the hardware infrastructure which exists, and of which they're already paying for.
>>>
>>>I pray that someday you understand that software is not like tangible goods which must be administered one-by-one, and therefore should be charged for one-by-one. Software is different, and operates on the create-once, replicate-infinitely model.
>>
>>But that's not really true. Because software, whether an OS or an application, has to deal with different hardware, and in the case of software, with variations in the OS. I remember the tester on the VFP team used to have all kinds of different configurations of hardware and OS versions to test on. They had more computers per desk than pretty much anybody else. (And IIRC, when my kid worked at Microsoft, he had two computers on his desk.)
>
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>People expect to pay for hardware. They buy hardware as a tangible thing, something they can hold, smash, scratch, etc. It is a real thing. Software is not. If I accidentally corrupt a file, I can simply replace it with a backup, or download it again. You can't do that with a motherboard.
>
>And, generally speaking, hardware makers write their own drivers. It behooves them as part of THEIR business cycle do to so because they want to have wide use for their tangible product, so they put the effort in to make it work widely. Similarly, it also behooves Microsoft to make it easy for hardware vendors to create drivers for their platform, so Microsoft creates a robust driver framework and provides certification. This is true of other OS vendors as well, including Linux.

Yeah, but it's unreasonable to expect hardware makers to create drives for 15-year-old operating systems. So even if Windows get updating XP, pretty soon, a lot of people would be SOL.

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>There are things which are natural.
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>
>>Ever had to debug a problem for a client because they had an oddball printer or a video driver caused trouble? It's not as simple as you imply.
>>Tamar
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>Yes. And if it's on some obscure piece of hardware I've often advised them to buy another one because the cost of the labor involved in tracking down the bug greatly exceeds the cost of buying another piece of hardware. In other cases, I have tracked down the bug. It depends on the nature of the bug. If multiple users have issues related to a particular thing, then I generally track it down in the program because it's a legitimate bug unrelated to hardware, but software algorithms or settings.

My point was that for Microsoft to keep supporting XP, they'd have to keep making sure it worked on wide varieties of hardware. It's just not as simple as write it once and forget it.

Tamar