In the military classroom, we teach 4 phases of war, one of which is "Withdrawal" (the others are Attack, Advance, Defence). One of the reasons for withdrawing is that the terrain cannot be defended, and thus we withdraw to terrain that can be defended. It's all fairly common sense stuff, but we are up against an inbuilt fear in all politicians and not a few soldiers that withdrawal is retreat and retreat is failure.
Sometimes it is necessary to give up ground. Microsoft are now in that position. They are over extended on platforms, and need to back away from support of all older versions of the OS, if they are to have any chance of fielding a secure OS in the next couple of years. More evidence of this withdrawal is now coming to light:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1736395,00.asp
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2760
These two articles discuss the withdrawal of support from various products, for security reasons. For Microsoft, the defensable terrain is Windows XP. Or, at least, that's their strategy!
Posted by iang at December 7, 2004 04:33 PM | TrackBackMicrosoft Scraps Plans for Windows 2000 SP5
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1732610,00.asp