Microsoft Extends Product Support to At Least a Decade

by Alex Woodie

Yesterday marked the official beginning of Microsoft's new support policy that guarantees at least 10 years of support for all business and developer products. Under the new policy, which Microsoft announced at its TechEd conference in San Diego last week, customers will still get five years of "mainstream" support, but the "extended support" that follows it has been increased from two years to five years.

Under the previous policy, Microsoft offered five years of mainstream support and two years of extended support for its business and developer products. The updated policy provides for five years of mainstream support after the date of general availability (or two years after the successor product ships, whichever is longer) and extended support for five years after mainstream support ends (or two years after the second successor product ships, whichever is longer). Mainstream support includes security updates, a variety of free and paid-for incident support services, and the ability to request non-security hotfixes. Extended support entails security updates, paid product support, and other fixes for which you have to pay Microsoft. Microsoft also offers free online self-help, including access to its extensive KnowledgeBase library, for all of its products (not just business or developer tools), for at least 10 years.

The new policy will give customers more time and wiggle room to make migrations, Microsoft says. For example, under the old policy, mainstream support for Windows XP was set to end December 31, 2006, which would have given users a matter of months to migrate to the next major release of the Windows operating system, the long-awaited version code-named "Longhorn," which is not expected to ship until early 2006 (if Microsoft makes its deadline). Microsoft's database customers face a similarly tight upgrade path with SQL Server 2000 support set to expire at the end of 2005 and SQL Server 2005 not shipping until the first part of 2005.

Microsoft's improved support policy reflects the slower upgrade cycle in today's corporate offices and the fact that businesses today are staying on older versions for longer periods and are not upgrading as quickly to newer versions of software when they are released. Microsoft learned this lesson firsthand earlier this year when it was forced to extend support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE to 2006 when users expressed their displeasure with the Redmond, Washington, company's decision to let support die for that operating system, which is still in widespread use.

Only business software and developer tools currently on mainstream or extended support are covered under the new policy, which does not cover consumer, multimedia, hardware, or the Microsoft Business Solutions accounting and ERP software. The extension also does not cover Windows NT 4.0, which loses its pay-per-incident support at the end of 2004. You can find more information on Microsoft's support lifecycle page.