Buildings are understood to have a finite lifetime. They are torn down all the time.

The meager support provided with software is an intentional tradeoff. I'm sure it isn't the right choice all the time, and as you say, there probably is demand for a different set of tradeoffs, but for example, I have no desire to pay Microsoft up front for 20 years of support, I'd rather get shiny new things more often than that.

> Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change.

I fully agree.

And I truly believe that the world would be a significantly better place if software developers worked for stability and fixing issues, instead of entertaining themselves with "cool" (to their understanding) features or migrations/refactors to new frameworks or languages (and yes, I know these are, sometimes, truly needed). We are way to good at justifying wasted effort and plain "play".