They keep bending over for these antiquated companies that have a terrible development process that traps them on old versions of software.
This is Microsoft’s bread and butter, this is exactly how they made it this big and this is where the money is at (nowadays they probably earn way more on Azure tho), the problem is not the business model (even tho I imagine it’s grueling shitty work for the devs), the problem is the management cutting corners wherever possible.
I think at a societal level that is a bad business model. It makes no sense to maintain old software just to delay the work of upgrading (which only becomes harder over time). Software isn’t a car or a building, there’s almost no cost to frequent updates and modifications.
there’s almost no cost to frequent updates and modifications.
That’s absolutely not true at all for the vast majority of domains. For example there’s a reason a lot of financial computer infrastructure still runs shitty old COBOL code and it’s not just laziness and lethargy, there is real cost to rewriting it and then extensively testing the rewrite.
Sure maybe you’re right, maybe the risks and upfront work would pay out in the future but it’s not like being conservative with these things is highly unreasonable and just a result of laziness.
I guess I was mostly thinking about it from the user side of software, not in-house software. If it’s in-house there’s a cost to any kind of software changes. But keeping someone else’s software up-to-date usually involves running some backups and migrations, updating configuration, planning out deployments and so on. Still takes work and planning, but the more frequent the updates, the less work it is. Of course, things become end-of-life and then you have to potentially have to make “in-house” changes that take a lot of work. But it seems like a lot of companies are on LTS versions of things just because they didn’t take the time to plan how they were going to do upgrades. So because they don’t have the processes in place themselves, they outsource that to Microsoft to maintain the existing versions indefinitely.
This is Microsoft’s bread and butter, this is exactly how they made it this big and this is where the money is at (nowadays they probably earn way more on Azure tho), the problem is not the business model (even tho I imagine it’s grueling shitty work for the devs), the problem is the management cutting corners wherever possible.
I think at a societal level that is a bad business model. It makes no sense to maintain old software just to delay the work of upgrading (which only becomes harder over time). Software isn’t a car or a building, there’s almost no cost to frequent updates and modifications.
That’s absolutely not true at all for the vast majority of domains. For example there’s a reason a lot of financial computer infrastructure still runs shitty old COBOL code and it’s not just laziness and lethargy, there is real cost to rewriting it and then extensively testing the rewrite.
Sure maybe you’re right, maybe the risks and upfront work would pay out in the future but it’s not like being conservative with these things is highly unreasonable and just a result of laziness.
I guess I was mostly thinking about it from the user side of software, not in-house software. If it’s in-house there’s a cost to any kind of software changes. But keeping someone else’s software up-to-date usually involves running some backups and migrations, updating configuration, planning out deployments and so on. Still takes work and planning, but the more frequent the updates, the less work it is. Of course, things become end-of-life and then you have to potentially have to make “in-house” changes that take a lot of work. But it seems like a lot of companies are on LTS versions of things just because they didn’t take the time to plan how they were going to do upgrades. So because they don’t have the processes in place themselves, they outsource that to Microsoft to maintain the existing versions indefinitely.