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Wannacry About Business Models

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Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#2
This is a bizarre perspective.

Microsoft isn't a victim here. They made decisions that made it difficult or impossible for customers to upgrade their software. They also print money.

Is it a pain in the ass to support a bunch of old software? Yes. Should anyone, anywhere have any sympathy for them? No.

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#3
post #2

This is a bizarre perspective. Microsoft isn't a victim here. They made decisions that made it difficult or impossible for customers to upgrade their software. They also print money. Is it a pain in the ass to support a bunch of old software? Yes. Should anyone, anywhere have any sympathy for them? No.

How "old" is sufficient? Forever?

Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#4
post #2

This is a bizarre perspective. Microsoft isn't a victim here. They made decisions that made it difficult or impossible for customers to upgrade their software. They also print money. Is it a pain in the ass to support a bunch of old software? Yes. Should anyone, anywhere have any sympathy for them? No.

How "old" is sufficient? Forever? Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?

What do you mean by forced? Logically Microsoft should decide ahead of time how long they are going to support a given version and publish this information so that potential buyers can decide whether its sufficient before buying. They do this, and you can read online how long they intend to support the software you are buying today.

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#5
post #2

This is a bizarre perspective. Microsoft isn't a victim here. They made decisions that made it difficult or impossible for customers to upgrade their software. They also print money. Is it a pain in the ass to support a bunch of old software? Yes. Should anyone, anywhere have any sympathy for them? No.

How "old" is sufficient? Forever? Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?

If they don't also fix "end-of-life" that's also in the wild, they'll get a ton of black eyes every time something like this happens.

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#6
post #2

This is a bizarre perspective. Microsoft isn't a victim here. They made decisions that made it difficult or impossible for customers to upgrade their software. They also print money. Is it a pain in the ass to support a bunch of old software? Yes. Should anyone, anywhere have any sympathy for them? No.

How "old" is sufficient? Forever? Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?

My question would be how could you bake into the original cost the cost of long term support when you have no idea how long one might use it? Windows XP was only end of life after 14 years. Some people STILL use it. I doubt the $139 price 14 years ago was expected to cover more than 5 years of use. Would $5/month forever make more sense?

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#7
>To put it another way, the alternative is not that the NSA would have Microsoft about EternalBlue years ago, but that the underlying bug would have remained un-patched for even longer than it was (perhaps to be discovered by other entities like China or Russia; the NSA is not the only organization searching for bugs).

False dichotomy. The choices are not only:

a) NSA pays lots of money to identify exploits and then hoards and uses them, vs

b) NSA does not identify exploits, leaving it up to China or Russia to do so and leaving us vulnerable.

There is a third choice:

c) NSA recognizes that only State actors have the money or time for this kind of thing, and should invest the money to detect and report exploits because China and Russia are probably doing so.

In fact (a) doesn't actually provide defense against China and Russia having the exploit: we were undefended until the exploit leaked, and without the leak, China or Russia could have executed an attack at any time. They didn't.

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#8
post #2

This is a bizarre perspective. Microsoft isn't a victim here. They made decisions that made it difficult or impossible for customers to upgrade their software. They also print money. Is it a pain in the ass to support a bunch of old software? Yes. Should anyone, anywhere have any sympathy for them? No.

How "old" is sufficient? Forever? Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?

Forced? No. But to avoid PR this bad? Probably.

At some point, the support stops being pulled from the product budget and starts being pulled from the advertising budget.

Dollars to doughnuts its worth it in the end.

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#9
It is easy to say put everything in the cloud and charge a monthly fee. The reality is there are all sorts of regulatory requirements that prevent this. How are you going to make a SaaS model work with SCADA systems? Many of these systems are networked and running ancient windows versions. SaaS for these systems doesn't work.

Re: Wannacry About Business Models

#10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How "old" is sufficient? Forever? Is fixing 0-days sufficient "support", or do you think Microsoft should be forced to actively invest in security updates for end-of-life software?

My question would be how could you bake into the original cost the cost of long term support when you have no idea how long one might use it? Windows XP was only end of life after 14 years. Some people STILL use it. I doubt the $139 price 14 years ago was expected to cover more than 5 years of use. Would $5/month forever make more sense?

You treat SW as a service and sell licenses instead of "boxed" copies.
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