This is a strange red herring because it is ridiculously expensive, but not meaningfully so on a per-handset basis.
Software development teams are ridiculously expensive. Going from two to four years might require a doubling in staff. You need teams dedicated to old architecture, conservatively $1m for 5 people. Your best engineers will want to move on to newer problems.
The problem compounds. These teams could be instead working on newer products with greater potential return, so they're billable at $4m for 5 people per year. 4 additional years of support is $16m. (This is fairly lean, but should be about the right order of magnitude +/- 1).
With 13m sold, that's about $1/handset. Apple/Samsung budget for this. Google chooses not to.
This is a strange red herring because it is ridiculously expensive, but not meaningfully so on a per-handset basis.
Software development teams are ridiculously expensive. Going from two to four years might require a doubling in staff. You need teams dedicated to old architecture, conservatively $1m for 5 people. Your best engineers will want to move on to newer problems.
The problem compounds. These teams could be instead working on newer products with greater potential return, so they're billable at $4m for 5 people per year. 4 additional years of support is $16m. (This is fairly lean, but should be about the right order of magnitude +/- 1).
With 13m sold, that's about $1/handset. Apple/Samsung budget for this. Google chooses not to.