Why do we end support on the second Tuesday at the end of a quarter?
Until January 2006, support for products used to expire on the anniversary date of their general availability. This meant that if a product was released on December 1, then it would also expire on December 1st - 5 or 10 years later. We received a lot of feedback from customers that this was not only inconsistent and hard to track, but also very hard to manage. In some cases, we might have 6 or 7 products all expiring on different days in the same month!
In January 2006, we announced a modification to the product expiration policy to address this issue. Now, all product expiration dates are rounded forward to expire on the second Tuesday after the end of the quarter. This means that if we previously had multiple products that would expire in December, with the new policy the new expiration dates would be rounded forward to the second Tuesday in January -- all expiring on the same day. Under this policy, products would only expire four times a year. This is much more predictable for customers and helps ease the management burden of tracking product expiration dates.
You may notice that this timeline also coincides with the second Tuesday security update release cycle. In the event Microsoft releases a security update on the same day that a product is scheduled to end its support lifecycle, support of the security update will continue for a minimum of 30 days.
We’ve received a lot of positive feedback on this change, since it helps makes the product expiration dates easier to understand and manage. What do you think? Does it make it make product expiration more predictable in your environment?
*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*
