I remain sad at this and other moves by Microsoft to generate recurring revenue from their operating system. Having lived from before the start of "PC software

I remain sad at this and other moves by Microsoft to generate recurring revenue from their operating system. Having lived from before the start of "PC software" to the present, one of the things that warped people was that as the market is growing and you have lots of people getting computers for the first time, you can sell them a copies of your software and get revenue every year. Once you hit saturation, your 'new sales' market goes effectively to zero[1]. For software that is 'done' (which is to say does everything it says it does) you're only choice is to "add features" or "add recurring revenue" (or as Intuit likes to do add a feature that generates recurring revenue). A much better plan (seeing it from this side), is to invest in a 'cold start' archive. Capture as much knowledge about the implementation and building of the software into an archive that a person 'skilled in the art' could access, and recreate the entire process from scratch to create a version of the software compatible with a new platform. Then record what it took to get it to the new platform and re-archive it. Similarly for fixing bugs. Yes it's boring maintenance work but ideally 90+% of the time the software incurs zero staff costs sitting in its archive. When that is the case, the cost of a bug fixed version or sales on a new platform handily cover the cost of the staff/operation needed to maintain it. No need to suck blood out of a stone as they say. [1] It isn't precisely zero but it can get pretty close.