Full disclosure: Haven’t read the article yet.

Working in corporate IT, this most likely is targeted toward enterprise customers who either take a long time to roll out OS upgrades or can’t due to technical limitations within their environment. In those cases, paying the cost of extended support is more palatable to troubleshooting or rushing mass OS upgrades. This is a fairly common practice with enterprise software vendors.

Edit: Okay, just skimmed it. Looks like this is actually a new program for non-enterprise consumers, which is interesting. First I’ve heard of that.