As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM.

I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.