My new year wish: Free Windows NT4.0

Microsoft stopped selling NT4 under volume licensing as of October 1, 2001. It said 5 years of service for an operating system is long enough. What? Just 5 years? I will have to respectfully disagree. To be frank, it sucks! How would it sound when a automobile manufacturer says it would not support its car after 5 years? Would you go buy that car with that information? I think not. I think the companies should be required by law to mention how long they intend to support their product before it even hits the market so that consumers can decide if they can live up to the upgrade/support cycle available.

I would say a 10 year period would have been a good term w/o putting too much burden on the customers financially. Now Microsoft is forcing customers to upgrade to its newer OSes which is guaranteeded to have some defections to Open source OSes.

Microsoft also announced recently the following changes:
January 1, 2004
Beginning on this date, non-security hotfixes are no longer available.
January 1, 2005
Beginning on this date, Pay-per-incident and Premier support are no longer available. This includes security hotfixes.
January 1, 2007
Online support is no longer available.

Now that we know that this product line is dead and Microsoft is not going to make any money out of product sales or support, I would like to suggest the following:
"Make the Nt40 free and downloadble as there are still many who thinks it is still a good enough OS for their job at hand. Since Microsoft guarantees security hotfixes, it is a win-win situation for both. It will also inject some goodwill among the masses that it is Microsoft and not Micro$oft"

Does Microsoft have to loose anything out of this? I think not. Here are the categories of users:

1. Existing NT 4 users: If they think their current NT40 deployments serves their needs, they are not doing to upgrade to newer Oses. No loss here.
2. New customers for the newer OSes: They would have chosen the newer OSes only if they wanted the new capabilties and the reliability. These people are not forced to buy newer OSes.
3. Potential customers for the newer OSes: This category of people would have chosen the newer OSes only because they are forced to buy newer OSes because the old one which suits their need isn't available in the market.

I think it is a pipe dream. But no one can stop me from being a dreamer.