It’s official – from today, Microsoft will no longer support Windows 98. It’s not entirely clear what immediate impact this will have on the estimated 70 million people who have resisted Microsoft’s best attempts to persuade them to buy another operating system. Maybe there are still a few brave souls out there who do still report bugs in Windows 98 to Microsoft (I can imagine the reply: “That’s fixed in Windows NT / 2000 / XP / Vista”).

However, one thing is certain – that’s another 70 million computers one step closer to landfill. Why does software have this impact on hardware? Microsoft’s business is driven by more “features”, requiring more horsepower, rather than greater efficiency, requiring less. Putting new software on an old PC is a thankless task. To make things worse, Microsoft’s pricing structure makes it much cheaper to acquire Windows as part of a new PC rather than buy at retail prices. So, goodbye last year’s PC.

But let’s suppose this worked differently. Let’s say that Microsoft was legally obliged to open-source products once they were retired. This would allow anyone to support the software. It’s a fair bet that there would be plenty of companies (and free software enthusiasts) who would relish the challenge. Those 70 million PCs could happily tick along until they genuinely fall apart from old age – potentially another decade or two of usage. The pressure would also be off manufacturers to keep producing ever more power-hungry PCs to cope with the ever-increasing demands of Windows.

If the manufacturer won’t fix your car / TV / PC because they say it’s obsolete, then you get someone else to fix it. So why should software be any different?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.