I'm not saying that I like the situation, but "free support forever" is a difficult business model and switching from free to support for a fee is not popular with users or dealers. From a business model perspective, market share for the older units is shrinking and since the manufacturers' support costs are relatively fixed, support fees per incident should be increasing. For customers that need it, Microsoft is charging fees for obsolete operating system support.

It's not just URC that is wrestling with this. Older application versions will not always run on modern operating systems. If this is your situation, you could install an older operating system in a virtual machine and run the old software, but this would not give access to modern models and features that are not programmable using the older software.

Apple is rather blunt about this. Unless a developer's App uses current API's, it will be dropped from the App Store and some of these current API's will not run on older pads/phones. While this is very annoying to lots of folks, Apple's viability as a company is not tanking.