I'm torn too. Gone are the days when an application could be developed and used for many years. Vendors can force-feed product version upgrades as the only means to be secure (i.e., patch bugs). And versions come out faster and faster. So, in addition to handing money over for assurance, you also need to spend a fortune to upgrade and redeploy applications that depend upon the product. No business process ROI - just the patches.

The development and production environments are in a continuous upgrade cycle that is getting ever shorter. Is there another platform option that's more stable? Are we are being manipulated into buying cloud services where we don't have to deal with this?