Economics have got us "all"---I'm afraid" in the "Slow Cooking of the Frog
Its called "Planned Obsolescence",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence products by design to only last so long and then fail. Usually they use materials that are prone to failure, however Epson and some other companies for a while were putting counters in their printers that would eventually reach a limit and then no longer print and fault out. I bought into an Epson C60 that had this counter and had this fault. With no info online and Epson stating that its time to buy a new printer, I threw it away and bought a HP printer. Then a few years ago I found information online about Epson adding a counter to their printers to limit their life, so that they would die after so many printed pages. A russian hacker found out a way to reset the counter back to 0 and make the printers work like new again. When Epson was confronted about this counter, they claimed that they added it because after so many printed pages the sponge below the inkjet cartridges in the home position is estimated to be full and the printer is non serviceable and so it should be thrown away at this point instead of the potential for ink to exceed the holding capacity of the sponge in a plastic compartment. Clearly they wanted customers to throw it away after so many prints, but they gave this weak explanation in which a proper design if the sponge was a concern should allow for the sponge to be replaced and then the counter reset.
Just about all manufacturers out there have planned obsolescence in their designs, as for if something lasted 15 years, then the market would get saturated with products that dont fail and sales would slump. So to guarantee sales, make products prone to fail after say 3 years, so many uses, or hours of use etc.
Auto manufacturers are the worst at this as for they take new models of cars and soak them in all sorts of salt water etc to not just make sure that a door or fender wont rot out in 3 or 5 years of the warranty, but also to make sure that it starts to rot at around the 8 year mark, so that a vehicle has to be scrapped at 10 years old in regions of the world where the autos are prone to these conditions. They also replace metal parts with plastic in which the plastic has been tested to fail at a certain age so that even a vehicle rarely driven with low milage is also prone to failure by design. Also seals and gaskets that could be made to last 30 years are designed to fail before the 10 year mark, so that the customer is replacing an expensive head gasket that most people who are savy in fixing their own autos dont have the means to pull a head off the engine, plane it, and add a new head gasket and intake and exhuast gasket, stretch bolts, etc... and so depending on the engine and complexity of how tight the engine bay is to work in, its easily $800 USD or more towards the $2500 mark, and people usually tend to trade it for new! Which is what the auto manufacturers want.
Lastly on the planned obsolescence, the Cash for Clunkers program was not really designed to get clunkers off the road in the USA, but it was designed to give incentive for people to get rid of perfectly good vehicles for new. Dealerships that got these autos transferred ownership of the vehicles to uncle sam and these vehicles could not be sold to anyone driving by the dealership finding a corvette or trans am there. And the dealerships were given a solution to pour into the engines. Turn the engine on and rev it to the floor until the engines seized up. The reason why clunkers was just a marketing term and not a real fact was because you couldnt drive to a dealership with a 1978 Buick LaSabre with a tired V8 that was burning oil and take advantage of this program. All the vehicles to be destroyed were vehicles that the majority of the americans with deeper pockets would own or would have owned. People who when taking advantage of this program were not going to trade in a Corvette for a Kia Sephia, but instead buy another brand new vehicle with a medium to high end price tag. There are some sad videos out there of perfectly good cars destroyed one of which was a Trans Am that I would love to own, in one youtube video that the guys at the dealership beat the crap out of it in the back lot first before seizing up the engine with the solution that solidifies at a specific temp locking the engine up tight.
Getting back to software ..... I havent run into any software with planned obsolescence in its design yet. The only that stop working are the ones that are trials, or games in which the game developer pulled the plug on their servers and so the client software is useless without it made by EA Games. Generally software can run forever if you have hardware that will run it. But with new computers and 64-bit and differences in design you can run into issues with 8 and 16 bit programs etc in which you can sometimes use virtualization, however sometimes your stuck best running it on an older computer if it cant be replaced or you dont want to replace it with new to save money etc.