Comment by bruce511
6 days ago
... all presuposing of course that the authors of that code are still around, and still want to make the effort of updating it.
In the enterprise world lots of software is more than a decade old, and no one is prepared to "update" it. The mindset in that space is for things to have longevity.
It's more of a mindset I think. Microsoft is clearly very focused on keeping things running. Apple (as a contrast example) is happy to change architecture, remove 32 bit support, and so on.
I agree it's a mindset, I just mean that that mindset has kind of coevolved with a bunch of other stuff.
Even Microsoft seems to be slipping. It seems like these days the (unstoppable!) Windows updates may actually change functionality and UI, which was much less common in the past. And of course the new versions of Windows are more aggressive about updating. They still maintain backwards compatibility for running third-party programs, but I feel like their mindset used to include more stability in their own software as well.