It’s a perfectly fair assertion given the abundance of commercial software in active use which is a “server” written into the back end of a desktop application.

It’s a perfectly fair assertion given the abundance of commercial software in active use which is a “server” written into the back end of a desktop application. They are not written as stand alone Services. Remember this is the real world we live in, where once a developer learns how to build a Windows application in Visual Studio, everything becomes a Visual Studio app based on the same template. Consider yourself lucky when the developer uses a newer version of Visual a Studio and dotNet than the one they started with a decade ago. In the perfect world, yes we would be paying developers high salaries and allowing lots of “down time” for retraining into the current version of dotNet, and allowing plenty of time to upgrade legacy applications to current versions of Windows. In the real world we still have that Windows 2000 server sitting around with a printed sign taped to the keyboard saying, “DO NOT UPDATE: PLEASE SEE JOEL BEFORE TOUCHING” only nobody remembers who Joel is and he left the company before Confluence arrived. All we know is that we can’t even install Remote Desktop Services because when Joel tried that it broke the application software. That sign appeared on the machine a week after that incident because that’s how long it took Joel to repair the server to the point that the application would work again.