I'd be a fan of Microsoft providing 3 or 5 years of support to business for free, then offering increasing levels of paid support for the next 5 and 10 years. It both preserves the revenue Microsoft depends on to operate, and gives businesses choices to keep operating their legacy systems, albeit at increased cost.
At a certain point, it's cheaper for businesses to rebuild their solutions with the latest tech Microsoft would prefer they are on, so they can re-license, rebuild their solution with modern tech, and start enjoying the benefits that come with free support for a new licensing period.
During the days of Windows XP, XP wasn't designed for a world of Internet threats, I think it would have been difficult for them to continue to support XP in a production environment while preserving compatibility with existing features.
Windows 10 is built for the modern world of threats. Microsoft sells a Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB (Long Term Serving Branch) with guaranteed support for 10 years to address many companies' needs. Everybody has learned from XP, Microsoft has learned that long term support is needed so the innovated their support model, and companies have learned that they can't expect an operating system to exist in a connected world for 15+ years. Hopefully with new support options and more reasonable expectations from business, Microsoft's LTSB support model is going to address everyone's needs.
Windows XP was most definitely deployed in a world with constant Internet threats! That it was not designed to address the threats is probably more of a misprediction on their part.
At a certain point, it's cheaper for businesses to rebuild their solutions with the latest tech Microsoft would prefer they are on, so they can re-license, rebuild their solution with modern tech, and start enjoying the benefits that come with free support for a new licensing period.
During the days of Windows XP, XP wasn't designed for a world of Internet threats, I think it would have been difficult for them to continue to support XP in a production environment while preserving compatibility with existing features.
Windows 10 is built for the modern world of threats. Microsoft sells a Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB (Long Term Serving Branch) with guaranteed support for 10 years to address many companies' needs. Everybody has learned from XP, Microsoft has learned that long term support is needed so the innovated their support model, and companies have learned that they can't expect an operating system to exist in a connected world for 15+ years. Hopefully with new support options and more reasonable expectations from business, Microsoft's LTSB support model is going to address everyone's needs.