I really hope it's an enterprise thing. Enterprise need to get better at upgrading and testing systems, otherwise as developers we are stuck accommodating the lowest common denominator. cough IE6 cough
Why do enterprise customers need to change their ways? Developers provide a service to them, not the other way around. Although if you don't want to support customers using old software, you don't have to. Maybe someone else will.
There's a lot of money that developers have to put into simultaneously keeping up to date with modern technology and supporting legacy technologies from a decade ago. At best, that cost alone ultimately has to get passed on to the customer. At worst, the end result is poorer quality software which brings higher support overhead and lower employee productivity.
Enterprises are changing because their customers want more. More services, more products. This drives the business units to try to deliver, and often they need better tools. But when the IT department becomes the bottleneck and the roadblock to delivering, people look to other methods like cloud based solutions. Or they just push for their own initiative internally and try to convince IT later.
But either way, enterprises need to move faster because the rest of the world is.
The current system is broken and if they hope to stay in business, they'll adapt.
Not because developers hate IE6, but because their customers want more features, and their best employees will move to better jobs.
They need to change their ways so we can spend time and money investing in new technology, not supporting an ever growing span of obsolete systems.
They don't have to, but they they will ultimately suffer along with all consumers.
Indeed. XP and IE6 are tired in the enterprise but, they are paid for, they work and apparently, we fear change. Those are the big three that I hear on a weekly basis from management. At this point, if Windows 8 was super enterprise friendly and completely free, we still wouldn't budge I am sure.
If they pull this properly I suppose either each release will be supported for the usual five years, or some releases will be picked as LTS. Either way, if support is long enough nobody forces anyone to upgrade on each release (it's not like enterprises upgrade on each release anyway).