There has been quite a gap in the releases of classic IOS of recent times - the latest release 15.7(3)M was a couple of days ago. 15.6(3)M was July 2016.
The 12 month cycle of these M releases is about normal, but there were no T releases leading up to this new major 15.7(3)M release, which is a break from tradition of all of the previous 15.x releases. Usually we would have seen multiple T releases with new features and bug fixes brought in along the way. There are as of now no release notes posted for it yet, so it's also unclear what is new.
There are still quite a few low end platforms such as the 800 series being released, which will require classic IOS for some time.
Also all of the 2900/3560 C/X/XR switches which are still running classic E IOS and look like they will never run XE on account of platform resources. There haven't been very many E releases either of recent times (I imagine we're probably due for another E release about now though).
Is this a sign that Classic IOS development is starting to tail off? Or is there a change in strategy?
What is the future roadmap for Classic IOS given Cisco are still designing and selling platforms which run it? They seem to be pushing a lot of other platforms such as the Cat3k/9k/ISRs to XE; wasn't the bigger plan to eventually phase out IOS in favour of XE and have one big consolidated platform for all routers and switches?
