I personally support this fully and I agree with a strategy of developers supporting their products throughout their entire life.

As much as anything it gives you really useful information on how people actually use user interfaces and what is successful and what isn't successful. It is for instance entirely possible to develop systems that while they never break are never used potentially just because the UI is unusable.

The interesting thing about that is that developers will have to get into the mindset of producing software that is low maintenance while very usable as they will otherwise end up not being able to take on new projects as they need to support old products. I think it will keep them tied to the high value critical systems as well as ensuring continuity for users.

Some of the best open source software projects have been developed by users who needed to use the product as much as develop the product and as such they develop / maintain and use the software all the time. If you can ever get to talk to these individuals they are nearly always industry leaders in their particular peice of software.