Enterprise != consumer market
"Continuous delivery is certainly what the cool kids are doing with software these days, so it's hard to fault Oracle on that front. And upgrades to major OS releases can be painful for ISVs and users alike. Removing the need to cope with big releases isn't terrible news."
You're right, it's not terrible news, it's horrendous. I'd like to know who those cool kids are, I assume Microsoft's Windows 10 is being addressed here?
The problem with this release model is that it makes things more dangerous and less controllable. It may work on a consumer level but most certainly not in the enterprise.
Example: FreeBSD's support cycle. As you can see there are 2 versions being maintained at the time of writing: 10.3 until April 30, 2018 and version 11 until 2021. Here's the thing: everyone knows where they stand here. When / if 10.4 comes out then you'll know that it won't contain major changes, new features to cope with, etc, etc. You'll know that it's still 10.x yet with several bug fixes. So upgrading is a relatively easily calculated risk.
This model also gives you plenty of time to prepare for an upgrade to 11, which will eventually be required. But as you can see here we have a whole year to plan for it. Actually a little more because 11 was released last year, and the end of support for 10.x has also been known for a while now.
But this new "hip(pie?) model" changes that. Now it can very well be possible that a minor release ships both a desperately required bugfix yet also comes with a totally undesired new or changed feature. That's simply not something which is always doable, depending on the environment of course.
What if the vendor decides to remove a specific functionality which is actually an extremely important detail within your environment? And don't say that it wouldn't happen, because those "cool kids" you spoke of have shown otherwise multiple times already.
For me this is far from providing better service to the customers, this is more or less shoving all required updates onto one huge pile and letting the customers sort out the mess. Less work, so lesser costs, for the provider and all the more burden for the customers / consumers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
