On 28 August 2006, Microsoft announced its new Custom Support Agreement (CSA) program, which brings some changes to the paid custom support. Instead of a high, flat annual fee - which did not vary based on the number of PCs, thus costing small organizations comparatively more than large organizations - customers will pay a fee only for PCs that are using the older software. Under the CSA, companies will get security fixes for critical and important vulnerabilities, but nonsecurity fixes will be provided at an additional fee.
During the past 12 months, many organizations have been migrating users running PCs with Windows 98 or NT4 (which are out of extended support) to newer operating systems (Oss). For the worldwide professional market, only 3.4% of PCs will be running old OSs by YE06, compared with 11.4% by YE05. There are also big regional variations. NT4 is much more visible in Europe compared with the U.S.
According to the results of a Symposium survey ("U.S. and European Companies Continue Move to Windows XP, Office 2003"), about 1% of PCs in large U.S. organizations were running unsupported OSs, compared with nearly 6% percent in Europe. The largest share from old OSs belongs to NT4, which is linked to old propriety applications. In many cases, the issue with old, unsupported OSs is vertically specific (for example, in finance/banking or manufacturing) when companies standardize on one OS and skip several further OS releases.
Having a more clearly defined policy is good, but this announcement still falls short in that area. Microsoft is not committing to a specific or minimum number of years of custom support per product. The company will decide on a per-product basis toward the end of the product's support term. Microsoft should do more standardization for the Ts & Cs of customized support – that is, annual contracts that can be renegotiated - and guarantee to give at least a one-year notice of any intention to withdraw customized support entirely.
Although small and midsize businesses will likely benefit from the change in pricing, it is difficult to determine whether most other clients will benefit from the change in the paid custom support program, because the pricing for older software support used to be negotiated on an individual client basis (there was no clear, fixed pricing list).
Paid custom support, even after the announced changes, will remain expensive. Try to avoid running PCs with an OS that is out of mainstream and extended support, and aim to migrate users to the OSs before the end of the 10-year support life cycle.
I think the current pricing structure of Vista is heading in the right direction, ie it enables those that already have a stable operating system such as XP to upgrade economically.
