Apologies for the rant, but this is the second article today that I've seen about a company discontinuing support for outdated software. (The other being a gnu rant about Windows not supporting XP.) And there was a third a couple days ago about an open source community announcing pending EOL of an old version.

What bugs me is so many negative comments along the lines of "What about all those poor helpless trillion dollar megacorporations that are stuck on an old version because they use proprietary custom software? Microsoft is evil because they don't guarantee to support and repair everything that they've ever made for free until the heat death of the universe!"

Those companies and organizations are stuck not because of Microsoft, but because they mismanaged their own proprietary software or web applications. For more than a decade, they never even bothered to plan for maintenance, although they routinely plan, budget, and schedule depreciation and maintenance for everything else in the business - things that move much slower than software and far far slower than web development. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but that's their fault, not Microsoft's.

My Windows machine is still on Windows 7 now, and not ready to upgrade to 10 yet due to compatibility issues. But I have 4 more years to get things working in a virtual environment, or find replacements. Software that I run dates back to the 70s, so some didn't work by default in 7, but in the end there was only 1 program that I couldn't replace or get working with an upgrade or VM. I reverse engineered the data to migrate it (it used an obsolete floating point format from before floating point ops were standard in PCs). If I can do that, a company or large organization can do it.

For web software, the pace of the state of the art is even faster. Most anything over a few years old probably needs a rewrite and data migration if it hasn't been maintained properly (and possibly even if it has). Especially anything that used old plugins.

But the focus on browser versions is weird. I strongly dislike the practice of web developers/designers speaking of 'supporting' IE6/IE8 or whatever. That's a Microsoft product, Microsoft supports it or not, you and I don't. We support the websites that we build, which we build to current industry standards (such as they are). If you try to access it using a nonstandard client like IE6, Arachne running on DOS, Hyperlink on a C64, or a line mode browser on a teletype, then your experience will be different. The server side will work fine, but your client may not do what it's not capable of.

You can't expect to stick a blu-ray disc on a record player or shove a flash drive full of MP3s into an 8-track tape deck and have the end-user experience be the same. It just doesn't work that way. Sure we can try to build custom client-side workarounds, but is that worth the cost (especially given that new browsers are free)?

Overheard at a meeting once:

Client: "Our stats say that'll be fine for our customers, but our executive team mostly has older versions of IE, so this won't work for them. We don't want it to look bad to the CEO."

3rd Party Agency Manager: "We'll order new laptops for them and have them delivered, just tell us how many and where to send them. It will be much cheaper for you and save us all a lot of time."