It's impressive that they had the patches, but chose to put the security of their customers on a lower level than making more money by forcing said customers to upgrade.
Their (ex) customers placed their own security on a lower level themselves. WinXP is unsupported for quite some time and was given plenty of time to switch or upgrade.
What's impressive is how people manage to spin this into an anti MS rant even when Microsoft is doing the right thing (stopping support for paleolithic software).
Windows 8 was shipping on brand new computers three years ago.
And while upgrading your OS is nice in theory, it often means abandoning perfectly-good hardware because driver support for multiple versions of Windows is terrible. In this age of barely-getting-faster CPUs, how long do you think a piece of hardware should be usable?
> Windows 8.1 Update is supported until 2023 AFAIK.
Talking about 8, not 8.1
> Purely out of interest what kind of hardware is incompatible between the two versions?
Many drivers tend to break as windows goes through changes. When I tried a preview of the windows 10 creators update I had a driver stop working right. There were also serious nVidia problems that broke the old driver versions; imagine that happening with your typical company that stops providing drivers after a year.
Though the driver comment wasn't specifically about 8. Good luck upgrading XP to not-XP, even if your hardware can perform better than a modern Surface.
Windows 8.1 Update is basically a roll-up update service pack to Windows 8 and is a free upgrade. That's like complaining that the released patches work on XP SP2/SP3 but not the original XP.
If someone fails to update Windows 8 to 8.1 Update or has magically written software that works on Windows 8 but not 8.1 Update, it's on them.
>Many drivers tend to break as windows goes through changes. When I tried a preview of the windows 10 creators update I had a driver stop working right. There were also serious nVidia problems that broke the old driver versions; imagine that happening with your typical company that stops providing drivers after a year.
Those drivers are typically either using bad coding practices or relying on unsupported features or bugs. Maybe you should contact them as a customer and let your displeasure known. If enough people do that they may actually do something about it.
1) Drivers break because they were poorly written, not because of Microsoft. (I know it because I write drivers)
2) Windows barely ever changes. The lengths through which the MS devs go to preserve compatibility are insane. It's incompetent driver writers who write buggy code who should take responsibility. If you were even minimally familiar with the Windows API, you'd know. And if you aren't, here's a quote from a Windows developer:
"I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95."
This is more like a pharmaceutical company taking a financial hit to help in a sudden epidemic by giving out antidotes/vaccines for free, for the sake of public interest and the ecosystem.
Just because they had the vaccines ready in warehouses or could manufacture more easily doesn't mean that their customers "deserved" them for free before the epidemic hit.
If the customers actually desired security, they would've paid for XP/2003 patches or upgraded to a different supported OS. Those customers messed up on their own, and Microsoft is giving them an out here.
I agree with you broadly but your analogy is flawed because patches have zero marginal cost (once developed, code can be infinitely duplicated at no additional cost) whereas vaccines are physical entities and therefore giving one to somebody entails not giving that same item to somebody else. If Microsoft had already developed these patches why not distribute them widely, since it costs nothing to do so and takes nothing away from paying customers?
> Just because they had the vaccines ready in warehouses or could manufacture more easily doesn't mean that their customers "deserved" them for free before the epidemic hit.
They can't force XP etc users to upgrade. Custom support accounts probably got the patches some time ago. This release is for all users of XP etc. I'm sure that most of them have no support contracts. And many are likely running pirated versions. Maybe this is PR-driven. But I can't imagine how it directly makes money for them.
You can't support everything forever, even with the kind of resources Microsoft has available. At some point you've got to tell people to upgrade off the old shit, we're not supporting it anymore (unless you pay us exorbitantly to do so...)
