This is an 80/20 rule thing. The vast majority of PCs get refreshed in one way or another every 3-4 years.
So a company like Microsoft can invest in the 80% of the market that drives sales (ie. people who refresh computers) OR invest resources in solving problems for the 20% of people running old hardware with an old OS they bought a long time ago.
Should the state of the art be driven by the fact that your employer chooses to leave you with a laptop that cannot play YouTube video?
The very next thing my company is going to do after rolling out the product currently under development is start aggressively collecting and compiling statistics on all of our support issues, service calls, and our customers' systems.
Even accounting for business clients on hiring binges, I'm really, really certain that the vast majority of the PCs that we support are more than 4 years old.
So a company like Microsoft can invest in the 80% of the market that drives sales (ie. people who refresh computers) OR invest resources in solving problems for the 20% of people running old hardware with an old OS they bought a long time ago.
Should the state of the art be driven by the fact that your employer chooses to leave you with a laptop that cannot play YouTube video?