New Support Life-Cycle Policy

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“.)