When I buy a motorbike the company only manufactures a finite number of spare parts that they charge for. When those have run out too bad.
That's a bad arguement. Because 1), the manufacturer licenses other companies to make OEM spare parts so that they don't have to, 2), there's nothing contractually illegal about making your own spare parts, if you have the know-how, 3), one patch can be applied to an infinite number of computers at pretty much zero marginal cost - you don't have to maintain a warehouse containing enough patches to meet demand, and 4), the manufacturer made no guarantee beyond the factory warranty, and doesn't give a crap what happens to your car after that, except in cases of defect/recall.
PiratePenguin is right - they said they would support it, and backed down. That's Microsoft's only real crime here. Unless you consider the general upgrade cycle to be a crime. Personally, I think planned obsolescence is criminal.
[OFFTOPIC]This reminds me about my trip to Ecuador. I was surprised how many ancient computers they had there. On the ship, there was a tractor-feed dot matrix printer that must have been at least 20 years old, still printing away like it was brand new. See, the prices of computer hardware have not been as artificially lowered in other countries as they have been in the US. Here in the States, it is ALWAYS cheaper and more cost effective to just get a new one when the old one breaks. Getting a replacement OEM motherboard from the manufacturer is always more expensive than getting a new computer. Not so in the rest of the world. If the hardware is broken, they fix it. There are people on street corners who sit with toolsets and fix anything you bring them. That's why 10-50 year old electronics are still being used over there.
Now, many of those people just don't have the processor strength to run WindowsXP. Hell, some of them can't even run Windows95! What will become of them when support for Windows98 is ended? Are you going down there to teach everyone how to use Linux? Are you going to install FC5 on their 75MHz PCs so they can run OpenOffice instead of Word?
Just something to think about. It's easier to argue against support when you don't need it.[/OFFTOPIC]