The original title is 12 words: "We Measured the Lifespan of 7,144 Software Versions. The Median Is 18 Months."

Short summary

An analysis of 7,144 software versions across 463 products found the median supported lifespan is just 18 months. Runtimes and cloud services rot fastest (under a year), while OS and hardware last 2-3x longer. The article argues that checking lifecycle dates once at adoption is a broken process and recommends continuous monitoring via CI gates and API checks.

• •Median software version lifespan is 18 months; mean is 2.3 years due to enterprise long-tails
• •Stack rots top-down: runtimes/frameworks/cloud services turn over fastest, infrastructure lasts longer
• •Recommends continuous lifecycle monitoring via CI gates and API checks instead of one-time adoption checks

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