Comment by Aloha
18 hours ago
I'm supporting a 30 year old product, the oldest one in the field are 20+ years old, we still support them.
I'm just in the process of developing a lifecycle policy, being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy.
(This may be a very ungenerous reading of your comment, so my apologies if this is not what you mean.)
The phrase that jumps out at me is:
> being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy
I think this is a nearly-poetical capturing of the core problem.
The focus is on the joy and well-being of the maintainer, not the impact to all the people who will be impacted by this change. Possibly some people rely on these devices and it adversely impact their joy and livelihood when support is ended.
This happens over and over again in tech.
its true and i agree with you as a user
on the other hand, some software gets harder and costlier to support the longer its out there (think spec changes, security issues, updates in law etc), and even paying a normal subscription for it can cause roi to go negative, especially when factoring in opportunity cost for a business (help the old users or spend that time/money making a new feature for the majority)
my thought on it is if its a subscription, maybe for some software, the longer someone uses the old version the subscription cost could go up slowly, or if its a one-time purchase, after x years they could just buy a support ticket or something...? for ad-supported software i have no ideas...
This reminds me of the time we needed to support IE6.
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How long should a hardware and software product be expected to last?
Try estimating doing win11 updates on a 20 year old piece of delphi spftware with hardware full go custom ASICs be expected to lsat?
Supporting is a word that means many different things.
It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.
It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.
It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.
Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.
Nobody is insisting that the physical kindles last forever, not that the software that they run be upgraded to support all the new bells & whistles of newer devices.
The point is that e-books are basically a data format plus a reader, and if the data format hasn't changed (it hasn't) and a reader is still working, what is gained by preventing that reader from being given new data to present?
amzn doesn't have to "provide support" for old kindles, but they also don't need to prevent them from downloading ebooks.
This isn't about hardware "lasting", it's about basic software functionality on older hardware intentionally being disabled. Somewhat similar to Apple's Batterygate.
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> How long should a hardware and software product be expected to last?
Until it dies due to unintentional software or hardware defect.
NOT when it is sabotaged by the manufacturer.
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Presumably that “support” you officer is tied to a nice fat multi-year support contract, no?
You can’t equate that to providing ongoing updates and support for a $100 hardware device indefinitely.
I have a customer that had to be talked into ending support for a product they built in the 80s and provided unlimited, material cost only, repair plan for.
They replaced the product, but they kept buying the parts and updating the software for the old one. And customers were absolutely still sending back their broken ones getting at cost replacements.
It was like looking at a well engineered, thoughtfully maintained hole in the bottom of a cruise liner.
There are other people who can and will support it. Let them.
There are companies that will make deals with tens of thousands of book publishers and provide storage and access for millions of books, magazines and comics? I suppose they will do it for free?
How do you know what Aloha does?