"End-of-life" (EOL) is a term used with respect to a product supplied to customers, indicating that the product is in the end of its useful life (from the vendor's point of view), and a vendor stops marketing, selling, or rework sustaining it. (The vendor may simply intend to limit or end support for the product.) In the specific case of product sales, a vendor may employ the more specific term "end-of-sale" (EOS). The time-frame after the last production date depends on the product and relates to the expected product lifetime from a customer's point of view. Different lifetime examples include toys from fast food chains (weeks or months), cars (10 years), and mobile phones (3 years).
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Product support
Product support during EOL varies by product. For hardware with an expected lifetime of 10 years after production ends, the support includes spare parts, technical support and service. Spare-part lifetimes are price-driven due to increasing production costs: when the parts can no longer be supplied through a high-volume production site (often closed when series production ends), the cost increases.
Computing
In the computing field, the concept of end-of-life has significance in the production, supportability and purchase of software and hardware products. For example, Microsoft marked Windows 98 for end-of-life on June 30, 2006. Its software produced after that date, such as Office 2007 (released November 30, 2006), is not installable on Windows Millennium or any prior versions. Depending on vendor, end-of-life may differ from end of service life, which has the added distinction that a vendor of systems or software will no longer provide maintenance, troubleshooting or other support. Such software which is abandoned service-wise by the original developers is also called abandonware. Sometimes, software vendors hand over software on end-of-life, end-of-sale or end-of-service to the user community, to allow them to provide service and further upgrades themselves. Notable examples are the web browser Netscape Communicator, which was released 1998 by Netscape Communications under an open-source license to the public, and the office suite StarOffice which was released by Sun Microsystems in October 2000 as OpenOffice.org (later LibreOffice). Sometimes the software communities continue the support on end-of-official-support even without endorsement of the original developer, such developments are then called unofficial patches, existing for instance for Windows 98 or many PC games.