I think you are merely highlighting one piece of what is an overall larger problem - support in general in the industry. Frankly, I think Microsoft does a better job than most large software vendors, but I do agree that Microsoft, along with just about all of the large vendors, have a big problem - they build something and by the time they need to support it, they are already moving on to other versions, or other products in general. Case in point...

We recently dropped McAfee anti-virus (which we did with Symantec Norton years ago) and switched to AVG. Why? McAfee loves to tout its "World Class support". My response to that would be "What world? Mars? Jupiter?", in our case it sure isn't Earth. We had a problem with McAfee and it was like they were doing everything they could to avoid supporting us - and what was the problem? Their own auto-update feature installed 2 versions of McAfee on a few of our machines and the two versions brought the machines to their knees - unusable!. Their solution? "We don't know how this happened"... Well, it did. After almost two weeks of listening to them baffled by this problem we gave up and simply made the decision to drop McAfee from all machines, and switch to AVG. That's world class support for you... We became convinced that Homer Simpson must have been the manager at McAfee.

Personally, I think laws should be passed that if a software company makes something, they should support it FREE for as long as it is used - or at least a reasonable length of time in years, not months. Further, license agreements that try to foist the "sold as is" baloney should be outlawed. I know of no other industry that gets away with that kind of thing. Imagine a car company with a serious problem NOT doing a recall!!

Those who would argue that a software company cant account for every OS or piece of hardware, should consider that this is, and always has been the nature of the business - but support over the years has become more a game of "dodge the issue" than "support what we produce" and that is just simply wrong.