Luckily, those of us running businesses don't need to worry about this, because the regulators probably won't let banks assign liability for fraudulent use of our accounts to us if it was their own negligence or incompetence that resulted in any losses.

Oh, no, wait. That was for personal bank accounts used by private individuals. As a business, the situation is unlikely to be a happy one if anyone does compromise your accounts because of these kinds of obvious security problems and you lose money because of it.

I've actually met small business owners who refuse to use on-line banking to this day because of this one issue. Personally, my businesses treat on-line banking as a business risk, keep careful records as we do with anything, but refuse to use Rapport since it has been found to destabilise our systems.

It wasn't alarmist when Rapport compromised the integrity of the computer I use to earn my living with a bad update. Boot from recovery disk, uninstall Rapport, revert to previous known good configuration, and the problem goes away. Let Rapport back on, computer immediately fails to boot again.

I told the bank in question that the software they asked me to install wasn't working, and now every time I log in to their business banking site, and I decline to use Rapport selecting the option that says it didn't work for me, they tell me that Rapport has been tested by them. So not only do they want me to install malware, but my bank is also incompetent at security. Great, now I'm really thrilled to be trusting them with my company's money!

In that situation, I don't necessarily care about their new product. I want to pay my X per year maintenance fee for the existing product I already have, and in return to get security and compatibility updates for as long as I need them.

If at any time what I get isn't worth the money, I have the option to stop paying and be no worse off than I was before. This is the crucial distinction between what I'd consider signing up for and a full subscription model that, for me, would be an obvious deal-breaker. One stops developing if I stop paying; the other stops working entirely.

If at any time Microsoft produce a new product that I want, I can buy that just as I would today, and in due course I'd then pay them to maintain that product properly instead of my old one.

In this case, the crucial distinction is choice. If I have Windows XP, I can choose to continue with it and receive proper maintenance updates even though Vista is out, and Microsoft get revenues to support that from my maintenance fees. If Windows 7 arrives, I can buy the upgrade from XP to 7, cancel the maintenance on XP, and then when my included-with-purchase maintenance runs out on 7 I just start paying the maintenance fees for that to keep my going while we all ignore Windows 8 and Microsoft try to make something I want more than what I already have.

Just to be clear, I was talking about graphics professionals there: people who design things like user interface themes and web graphics as their primary role have told me they prefer some of these newer tools to working with Photoshop for the same jobs. Photoshop simply wasn't designed for that kind of precision work, and its UI is far from ideal in that context. In several cases, Fireworks was cited as a better alternative, but we know how that story ended.

For digital artists, meaning people who really are essentially painting with a computer, sure, the tools I'm talking about aren't the best choice. It's not their niche. Likewise presumably for people who really are professional photographers or in a related role and so who really do need to touch up photography to production standards. It would be fascinating to see what kind of people are really using Creative Suite/Cloud applications and for what kinds of job, but I don't see how even Adobe can have more than sample/survey level data on that, and if they do I imagine they keep it very close to their chest.

Maybe, but extended support for Windows 7 will be available until at least 2020. Microsoft's publicly stated policy is:

People might constantly update. Whether those updates are upgrades is a very different question. I've had plenty of so-called upgrades in recent years that left me obviously worse off than I was before.

This has nothing to do with Agile software development. This is about cheap, nasty, rushed software development by organisations who can't or simply won't build software that lasts for use by people with real work to do. If Microsoft really does surrender to the same cheap junk philosophy in order to stay competitive in a market where people don't mind paying for cheap junk, we will all regret it in a few years.

Personally, I'd rather have an OS that can actually run the software I bought for more than five minutes. Fortunately, it seems that whatever the rhetoric being thrown around in this discussion, Microsoft have given clear public statements that are closer to my view on this one, so it would now be very difficult for them to renege on that with any OS they have shipped so far without risking significant legal trouble.

I think the software market is more complicated than that today. For example, a lot of people have been using Photoshop and Illustrator (and Fireworks) in recent years to design graphics for web sites and user interfaces: icons, logos, background images, that kind of thing. However, there are several applications available right now on OS X that are not only much cheaper than Creative Cloud but also get much more positive comments from professionals who are doing that kind of work.

Basically, we've all been trying to force Adobe's 800lb gorillas to do the job for years, but the reality is that we were just waiting for someone to come along with a tool aimed at exactly what we need to do, with a feature set and user interface tailor made for that kind of work. Now several different businesses have, and if the people in the industry I know are at all representative, those newcomers are already attracting a significant share of the professional market. Not only are they cheaper by far than Photoshop, they are also significantly better in that particular niche.

This is why I suspect it's a matter of time before Adobe's behemoths start to suffer a serious exodus. Rather like Microsoft with Office, they are trying to be all things to all people, but that creates huge application suites that are inevitably full of compromises and expensive to maintain. It's not LibreOffice that Microsoft should fear, it's tools like Scrivener stealing all the professional authors, some modern replacement for TeX stealing all the technical people, on-line collaborative editors Google Docs stealing all the casual business users, and so on. It's death by a thousand cuts.

The thing is, getting back to where we came in, the requirements for an operating system are quite different. If you're writing the foundation that all of these other applications are going to run on, then stability and longevity are vital attributes. So while I think Adobe's move to a subscription model will probably be successful in the short term but in the longer term it will prompt more effective competition than they've faced in ages, I think Microsoft have a natural ally in offering long-term support at a price because there are always going to be updates people want for compatibility with new hardware and software without sacrificing compatibility with what they already use.

I couldn't agree more, and I think your comment about defects that shouldn't ever have been there is the big concern with my preferred version. Then again, shipping junk with the excuse that you'll fix it later with an on-line update (or not) is regrettably how significant parts of the software industry seem to work already. I'm not sure we'd really be any worse off in that respect provided that, as I mentioned, a reasonable initial period of support is included free and expected as part of the original purchase.

However, later on, supporting things like new hardware or evolving networking standards, while maintaining the foundation I trust and backward compatibility with all my existing devices and software, isn't something I think can reasonably be demanded for free. This isn't something that should have been included on initial delivery, because the changing environment hadn't changed yet.

Sorry, I don't buy it. They might love to be Apple or Google and force their customer base to upgrade instead of providing long-term support, but that's not who they are, and the market most likely to pay them real money for their new OS isn't going to accept a compulsory 2-3 year upgrade cycle on every PC they run.

There's a joke in there somewhere about electrochromic windows being opaque except when the charges are set up right.

I'm guessing the majority of people I know enjoy the Web but don't use an ad blocker, so maybe you just have a much lower threshold for usability than most people.

The only ads I see aren't served from the major ad networks.

I still see plenty of ads, though: any e-commerce site I visit is full of "recommendations", reviews often have an "affiliate link" so you can buy the item reviewed and they get a commission (an obvious conflict of interest, but that's another issue), a lot of the niche sites I visit carry their own advertising, social network sites integrate self-hosted ads into their main feeds, and so on.

I don't really find those things annoying myself, precisely because they don't tend to be excessively intrusive.

Sure they will, but some won't, and some of the ones who do will hate you for it every day until they find a plausible alternative.

Adobe got away with Creative Cloud because at the time there wasn't really much competition for Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. There weren't many commercial/closed source alternatives, as Corel and the like are now a shadow of their former selves. This being Slashdot, someone will suggest the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus, and everyone who works with this kind of software professionally will smile kindly and ignore them.

However, within a couple of years, there were already well-regarded and well-featured competing commercial products, available for a tiny fraction of the cost of Creative Cloud, for some of the significant markets that Creative Suite applications used to appeal to. This seems to be particularly true of creating graphics for on-line use rather than traditional photography or print design, and I seem to hear many good things about several of those applications just in general discussions with other people who work in creative fields.

I don't hear many people saying positive things about Adobe's software any more, though. They were never really a well-liked supplier, IME, but now they're just the clingy ex you can't shake until you've obviously settled with someone newer and better.

That depends on your point of view.

We use various parts of Creative Suite occasionally for work, but not as everyday software. We bought a copy of one of the bundle versions more than four years ago, for a one-time price of about £1,250 at the time.

Today, it looks like the closest equivalent UK pricing on Creative Cloud is about £560/year. It would have cost us approximately twice as much so far under the new pricing model, and we'd still be locked into paying forever.

Defenders of the model talk about the benefits of paying a small fee monthly being more manageable, but I'm running a business and can add up, so accounting over the course of a year is hardly a burden.

Defenders of the model also talk about all the improvements Adobe make and the benefits of having the latest software, but if their improvements were worth much to us then we'd have bought an upgrade to CS6 and we never saw anything to justify the cost. I haven't seen much to got me excited in any of the applications we use ever since the move to Creative Cloud either; there's plenty that we would pay for, but either Adobe aren't doing those things or they aren't very good at advertising when they have.

The thing is, even if they did those things now, while we'd have happily paid for the upgrades on a one-time basis, there is zero chance that we're going to commit to unregulated rent-seeking on software we rely on to do our business. We have seriously considered spending significantly more money to get a high-spec Mac just so we can run some of the generation of graphics software that is emerging on that platform, sometimes costing less for a permanent licence that CC does for a single month, yet with a reputation that suggests it would be at least as good for the kind of work we do if not better.

I think our attitude to Windows payments would be similar. Give us decent optional upgrades at sensible intervals and we'll happily pay a reasonable price for that support. Try to lock us in so something we already paid for switches off if we don't keep paying, and we'll never buy Windows again, and just stick with our existing Win7 licenses until we move entirely to Mac and Linux machines.

Neither do I. Ticking timebombs are a complete deal-breaker for me.

However, I would seriously consider paying a reasonable recurring fee to fund continued updates for an OS that works well for me after some sensible initial period of free support, so that OS can remain useful for a very long time and continue to support backward-compatible functionality while still keeping up with necessary compatibility and security changes as the environment around it evolves.

Personally, I value stability more than random changes in user interfaces, and nowhere more so than in my operating system. I hate the modern trend of pushing out unreliable compulsory updates every five minutes, which don't just fix bugs or close security holes but also introduce regressions, maybe completely change the UI, or even remove functionality.

Windows has traditionally been a shining contrast to that, and Microsoft have put in a huge amount of effort over the years to support their software for much longer than most projects do. However, it was never really commercially sensible to expect the kind of effort to be made indefinitely by Microsoft when no-one is paying them anything extra for it. The result is turkeys like Vista and Windows 8, when apparently a lot of us were much happier sticking with XP or Windows 7.

So, I'd rather see some open, transparent arrangement where you know how long you get free updates for with the purchase and then there is a straightforward arrangement for funding more, instead of moving to some sort of lock-in/subscription model as promoted by the likes of Adobe or the "your software is more than five minutes old so we won't support you any more" model as promoted by the likes of Apple, Google and Mozilla.

Wow. Got a little off your chest there, buddy? :-)

It's worth remembering in these discussions that "advertiser" includes basically every business and for that matter every open social group in the world. It includes the emergency plumber you call when your home is flooding at 2am. It includes the band your kid wants to go see for their birthday. It includes your grandmother's knitting club.

There is nothing inherently evil in these people advertising. Their ads provide a useful social function because other people do want to find them. Of course, they also fund various media, which presumably the viewers/listeners/browsers value or they wouldn't be those things.

What everyone hates is excessive/intrusive advertising, and on the Web also the specific problems of malware/spyware served by ad networks. Those guys can go take a running jump, but let's all try to remember that they represent only a small minority of "advertisers", and they always have (or the Web would have become unusable long ago).

So, how about we stop talking as if we're stupid and think everyone who advertises is some evil demon whose only purpose in life is to frustrate everyone who browses the Web. Nothing useful comes from all the "advertisers should go kill themselves" bull that people who I can only assume are twelve years old post every time this subject comes up.