Re: I'm surprised nobody's mentioned it yet ...
Why the fuck are we even thinking about using a General Purpose OS to run specific purpose equipment?
History?
Going back to the 1990's, MS was on the rise and was desperate to become more of an Enterprise IT supplier, hence the development of NT and it's successors, which resulted in the success of XP-SP2/SP3 and WS2K3. Similarly, MS made a big play into embedded, which also paid dividends in XP Embedded.
Prior to MS and to some extent prior to the consumer IT industry, it was fairly normal to pay for a licence and support and product lifecycles were more about sales than support. Hence why in the mid to late 1990's it was quite common to have businesses running mainframes and other major systems running OS's from the 60's~80's, still being maintained, but not available in the shops.
I think there was an expectation that once MS had become an enterprise supplier, it also would become more flexible about its product support lifecycle, with pre-existing customers. Instead we've seen MS deliberately take steps that have alienated it from enterprise IT such as releasing a succession of Windows versions since XP that have really been focused on the consumer market and aping Apple (badly) and only belatedly trying to retrofix W10 to the enterprise.
Which seems to support a stance I took when W8 was released, namely the time between then and EOL of W7 was the best opportunity Linux/open source had to get into the enterprise anytime soon.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
