> Microsoft has plenty of paying customers to continue supporting Windows as-is, some for decades I have to respond to this thought because -- I don't think it

> Microsoft has plenty of paying customers to continue supporting Windows as-is, some for decades I have to respond to this thought because -- I don't think its true. Aside from government and military, which of those paying customers truly have revenue streams so guaranteed that those entities cannot be replaced or outcompeted over the course of decades by somebody approaching the problem with fresh eyes -- or even just some internal division at the same company approaching the problem with fresh eyes and building something _better_ because it was allowed to change as opposed to something very stable because it is _not_ allowed to change? For government -- do we really want/need our government throwing money away because they are more or less not allowed to development new solutions to old problems? For military -- ... yeah well ... I don't know what to think about military ... Military is not a sector that has any measurable goals aside from self-perpetuating its budget so its hard to argue against boondoggle maintenance projects as having some capacity for objective success with regard to that goal ... But -- perhaps there is a future where the system could reasonably decide that the wisest course is to _not_ spend billions of dollars keeping 1980s era visicalc programs running unmodified so that they can properly manage the floppy disk supply chain for nuclear missile silos ...