Frankly Speaking: Obsolete defined

17.01.2006
In the wake of Microsoft 's early release of its patch for the WMF problem, lots of Windows users are unhappy. They complain that Microsoft's patch is designed for Windows XP and 2000, not Windows NT, ME, 98 or 95, even though those operating systems are also vulnerable and tens of millions of copies are still in use. Of course, we all know why Microsoft didn't patch those older Windows versions: They're obsolete.

Hewlett-Packard 's midrange MPE operating system is obsolete too. Anyway, that's HP's story. MPE users, several thousand strong, believe MPE still works just fine. In December, HP agreed to extend support for those users for three more years.

Obsolescence is a much more slippery concept than it first appears.

That shouldn't be a big surprise. Vendors call something obsolete when they can no longer make money selling it. IT shops say the same thing isn't obsolete until we can no longer make money using it -- or maybe just until it no longer fits into our corporate IT architectures.

And end users, the people at their desks? Many of them believe a familiar IT system isn't obsolete until the pain involved in getting it to do what's needed is a lot greater than the pain of migrating to something new.

Still profitable, still useful, still bearable. Whose definition of obsolete is right? All of them. And they interact. When a vendor declares that a venerable product is going end-of-life, it's likely to be tagged for removal from corporate IT's plans. But users don't like that. Change means disruption. They push back against IT. IT pushes back against the vendor. And obsolescence gets redefined again.