Your argument applies to anything that has been obsoleted. What about the poor bastards who can't afford a car and depend on a horse and buggy? The highways are

Your argument applies to anything that has been obsoleted. What about the poor bastards who can't afford a car and depend on a horse and buggy? The highways are too dangerous for them. What about those "long-term" planners who standardizes their IT infrastructure on Jazz drives? And the poor sods who think all new laptops are awful because of that one printer they bought in 1987 that needs a serial port? IE7 and COM are fucking ancient. And they're both shitty technologies. COM, especially, is a sad, disgusting 1990's remnant of "guru"-level C++ shit-baggery that is the only technology I'm aware of where the boiler-plate code is 2x to 3x more than the actual code. I'm glad those are put on the back-burner by MS. Unix is from 70's and it's fucking solid. You wrote C code in 1975, you could probably port it to Ubuntu Linux without too much effort. You "standardized" on "enterprise" (a hilarious word, btw) technologies like IE7 + ActiveX? You deserve all the pain that is being dished out to you. The crying and stomping of feet that happened at my company after IT deprecated WinXP + IE6 was music to my ears. The world doesn't need IE6. It doesn't need IE7. It doesn't need COM. What it needs is fewer "enterprise architect" types who read too much MSDN Magazine and develop brittle "solutions" based on ActiveX and sell them to unsuspecting victims.