• Illustration: Support Life Cycle for Business and Development Software
• Chart: Life-Cycle Dates for Major Desktop Products

Microsoft has extended the product life cycles for most of its current business and consumer products, increasing the period during which they are fully supported from three years to five. The longer life cycles correspond more closely to the time frames in which business customers typically replace computers and give customers more predictability in planning deployments, service contracts, and budgets. The change will also help Microsoft more accurately predict its own support costs over the life of a software product, although the company’s support costs could increase because it will simultaneously support more versions of its software.

What’s Changed

In general, the new life-cycle guidelines say that most Microsoft consumer and business products will get "mainstream" support—including incident support, hotfixes, and warranty support—for at least five years from the release of the product, and they will get online support (through the online Knowledge Base at support.microsoft.com) for at least eight years. (See the illustration "Support Life Cycle for Business and Development Software".)

Previously, Microsoft promised only three years of full support for certain products, such as desktop operating systems (OSs). This was followed by an additional year of extended support, during which customers had to pay for support services that were free during the mainstream phase, although security patches are still free during this phase. Online support spanned the mainstream and extended phases, plus an additional year or more. Support timelines for some other products were not fixed, but were based on versions: the company would support the recent and the previous release, for example.

Microsoft has also broadened its support for service packs: It will now provide support for software to which either the most recent or the previous service pack has been applied. Previously, software had to have the most recent service pack before the company would provide support.

Implications of the Changes

The overall impact of the changes is that Microsoft will support its products for a longer period of time, and customers will have clear guidelines as to when that support will end. The changes affect a wide range of Microsoft customers, including corporate purchasers, service providers, consulting companies, and training organizations, as well as Microsoft itself.

Corporate purchasers have been pushing for longer life cycles because they typically upgrade desktop client software only when they upgrade PC hardware, which happens, on average, about every four years. In the past, some software was nearing the end of mainstream support while the hardware still had a year or two of useful life, which presented support difficulties.

For example, a PC purchased in 2000 and loaded with Windows 2000 could still be in use in the summer of 2003, but under Microsoft’s old guidelines the OS would no longer be eligible for mainstream support, and organizations would have to pay extra for support, upgrade the client software before they wanted to, purchase new hardware, or run the system without support from Microsoft. In contrast, the new guidelines will maintain mainstream support for Windows 2000 until 2005, and extended support until 2007, by which time the hardware is likely to be replaced.

As a result, product life cycles will be less an issue when companies are planning their future technology infrastructure, budgets, and support requirements.

Service, consulting, and training organizations will need to have staff on hand with the skills appropriate for the broader range of products that customers are likely to be using as a result of the lengthening life cycles.

Microsoft will need to support a wider range of products simultaneously. For example, in 2005 it might be required to support as many as four different desktop OSs, including Windows 2000, Windows XP, an unnamed client that might ship in 2004, and the Longhorn release, which could become available in 2005. (For more information about future OS releases, see "A Fork in the Road to Longhorn?".) On the other hand, the clear guidelines will help Microsoft plan for provisioning support.

What the Guidelines Cover

The new guidelines apply only to newer products, including Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Office XP. Guidelines announced in 2001 for older programs will still apply: extended support for Windows 98, Windows 98SE, and Windows NT Workstation 4 will end on June 30, 2003; extended support for Windows Me will end Dec. 31, 2003. After those dates, only online support will be available. All support for their predecessors—MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 95, ends on Dec. 31, 2002.

Similarly, Office XP will get five years of mainstream support. Office 2000 is on the older "year-based" support schedule and will get mainstream hotfix support until June 30, 2004 and extended support until June 30, 2006, but hotfix support for Office 97 has already ended. However, Microsoft will continue to honor existing support agreements that cover Office 97 until Jan. 16, 2004. (For more details about Windows and Office life cycles, see the chart "Life-Cycle Dates for Major Desktop Products".)

Support dates for server applications are complex and vary by service-pack level, but the support for recent products generally conforms to the new guidelines.

Consumer vs. Business Software

The support timelines for business and consumer software differ primarily in that business software will receive an additional two years of extended support after mainstream support ends. Consumer software does not have an extended support phase, since consumers don’t purchase the support contracts required during the extended support period.

Most consumer, multimedia, and hardware products will have five years of mainstream support, except for products that have a new version released each year, such as Money, Encarta, and Streets & Trips, which will get three years of mainstream support.

Support for OS components—primarily Internet Explorer (IE) and Windows Media Player—also differs depending on whether the component shipped with an OS or was available only as a separate download and whether it is running on a consumer or business platform. For example, support for IE 6 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) on Windows 98 ends on June 30, 2003, but mainstream support for IE 6 SP1 on Windows 2000 runs until Mar. 31, 2005.

Resources

Microsoft’s product life cycle is described at http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle.

An index to Web pages describing the life cycles for major product groups and individual products is available at support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;complifeport.

For information about previous life-cycle guidelines, see "Windows Desktop Life-Cycle Guidelines" on page 18 of the Apr. 2001 Update.