Microsoft Vista, IE7 Banned By U.S. DOT

An anonymous reader writes "According to a memo being reported on by Information week, the US Department of Transportation has issued a moratorium on upgrading Microsoft products. Concerns over costs and compatability issues has lead the federal agency to prevent upgrades from XP to Vista, as well as to stop users from moving to IE 7 and Office 2007. As the article says, 'In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."'"

Comments

Nothing really unusual about it

[2.7182]

This is an agency that is very conservative. I mean, it's illegal to have curved driver side mirrors in the US for pete's sake.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[allscan]

The original poster is talking about the mirror(glass) itself, not the housing. Curved glass and mirrors change the shapes and point of view of objects when they reflect. So, things may look out of place when looking into the mirror.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[skiingyac]

I think his point is that drivers side mirrors have a blind spot, which causes who knows how many accidents, but its illegal for manufacturers to make the mirrors in a different way, which is why K-Mart sells those little $2 stick-on convex mirrors. Seems like a lot more engineering time is spent on things like heated/cooled beverage holders than would be needed to design a better side mirror, I don't know the law but I'd assume thats why manufacturers haven't improved them. Of course, if somebody (the manufacturers) lobbied hard enough for it, I'm sure the DOT would change their mind.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[geoffspear]

...until idiot drivers who don't understand "objects in mirror are closer than they appear" start causing more accidents. Although I suppose the passenger side ones would be banned too if there was enough such stupidity to have a statistically significant impact on the number of accidents.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Divebus]

"..there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."

The DOT is just figuring this out now? Hell, most of us knew this years ago.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[skiingyac]

yes, certainly don't want to underestimate the idiots. However, I can't count how many times somebody has almost side-swiped me w/o checking their blind spot, or how many times I've had to hit my brakes a little harder b/c of something in front of me than if I did not glance to check my blind spot. Maybe they could just dedicate a 1-2" x 1-2" of your mirror (the bottom rightmost part that is usually just showing you a reflection of your door) to your blind spot, it would be small enough to keep people from using it to gauge anything other than that something other than the road is in their blind spot.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[DeadChobi]

If you're able to see your door, your mirror is not adjusted correctly. You're supposed to adjust until you're just outside of the range where you would see your door.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

Where I work we just switched to XP from Windows 2000 less than 2 years ago. We won't switch to Vista anytime in the near future (my guess is three years at least). This isn't a story, it's standard practice. In order to upgrade, you need to do a lot of testing and updating software, especially in-house apps. If they were using Linux, they wouldn't update the kernel as soon as it was available either.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[skiingyac]

I usually have mine adjusted so I can see a very tiny sliver of the door. Otherwise it is hard to gauge how far you are from something on the side of your car if you are backing up or pulling into a tight spot... is that right or am I missing something?

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[thewils]

Who is this pete? And why doesn't he like curved driver side mirrors?

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[bcattwoo]

This is how I have heard you should adjust your mirrors. While sitting in your usual position lean your head to the left until it is almost against the window. Adjust your mirror until you can just see the back corner of your car. As a car passes you while driving, it should become visible in your sideview mirror just as it leaves your rearview and be visible out of the corner of your eye as it leaves your sideview. Seated comfortably with the seat all the way back I have to crank my mirrors all the way out to the maximum but it works.

If you want to see where your car is when backing up, just turn around and look. The back corner of your car isn't going anywhere.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[ClaraBow]

On a more serious note, this beg the questions of what more can be added to the Windows Operating system? Isn't going to be complete at some point? I played around with Vista and there are some like a nice improvements, but I don't see six-years of work or enhancements. Maybe they should concentrate on building a solid kernel and leave the GUI to third party developers.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[aedan]

European Volvo mirrors have a faint vertical dotted line about 2 cm from the outside edge. To the outside of this line the mirror is convex and gives you a better view of the blind spot.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Savior_on_a_Stick]

We won't be migrating to Vista either.

Most likely upgrade path for us is to linux - but only when we either change our accounting package to one supported on that platform, or Intuit ports to linux, or Crossover Office fully supports the latest QB enterprise.

Second likely path would be an OSX server -if and only if the price and licensing were not as heinous as they are with M$.

Of course, the third option would be not to migrate at all.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[PitaBred]

But... what if I'm backing up close to something that's near the driver's side (or passenger side) of my car? Or it's below the level of the door panels and such? Mirrors are pretty much the only way to see those obstacles reliably, and judge your distance from them.

Maybe the idiot moniker was misplaced, and should have been self-attributed?

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[cayenne8]

"I think his point is that drivers side mirrors have a blind spot..."

Don't most people actually turn their heads to LOOK before changing lanes?

That's the way I was taught to drive.....

I keep a constant eye on the mirrors while driving to have a good feeling where traffic is around me, but, I always turn to look before changing lanes...

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Ollierose]

not really - my instructor suggested something really obvious which I'd recommend to you here. If the hazard is on your left (parked cars and so on - I'm a brit), look over your left shoulder as the poster above suggested. If its on the right, wind your window down (the glass gives you bad refraction) and look over your right shoulder at what you're trying to avoid hitting.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[sumdumass]

The US DOT doesn't actualy make laws for most people. They make standards and complaince documentation and rulles for certain comercial related transportation needs. CDL drivers and parts of the rail coverage, mostly how companies do things or how loads are the be tied downa nd such.

Most everything else goes by state to state and in some cases county by county. And as for a curved mirror? I'm not exactly sure what you mean. My pickup had round mirrors from the factory and when I drove cross country, My pertbuilt have a round buble mirror under the regular mirror. This mirror was curved in that they both were round in shape and the bubble mirror was curved around the surface to increase the visual distance it could cover.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[networkBoy]

Are you nuts?
Then we'd have wGnome Vs. wKDE flamewars. That's the only damn thing I seem to like about windows is the unified desktop manager.
-nB

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Ash Vince]

you shouldn't be using your mirrors for backing up unless you're driving something 25ft long and have a CDL and so forth

I was just discussing this with a friend who is a professional driver. He was saying he uses his mirrors for reversing quite a lot since he used to drive a delivery van and so has just got in the habit of doing this.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I know!

Actually, I wasn't taught to look, and even though I had heard about cars having a blind spot, I didn't worry about it. Then one day a couple of weeks after I got my license I was slowly changing lanes and this guy started honking so I wouldn't hit him. I got a good scare out of it, and learned to turn my head.

It's good advice, and people should be taught to do it. Most people just don't care, and don't even bother to signal.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[ryanov]

I'm told the place to have them is so you can just see your door handle when your head is up against the glass (for the driver's side) and the center of the car for the passenger's side.

That seems to work wonders -- cars pass from the rearview directly into my side mirrors. It takes a slight bit of getting used to (you can't see your car -- you just need to know what part of your periphery that mirror shows), but it's safe.

If you need to see for backing into a spot, stretch your neck out (curbs, etc).

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[UncleMidriff]

I work as a contractor for the FAA, which is under the DOT, and around here, Windows XP is a brand new thing. We just switched from Windows 2000 less than a year ago, for the reasons you stated.

I have no doubt that the FAA will switch to Vista a some point, but it will likely be around the time the next version of Windows comes out. I'm not holding out much hope for a switch to Linux then, either, as most of our in-house apps are .NET, VB 6, or even Access(!).

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Water]

We just finished our XP upgrades last month. I was on 2000 until mid January

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

He's my second cousin and he doesn't like anything he can't derive.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[skarphace]

doesn't sound right. you shouldn't be using your mirrors for backing up unless you're driving something 25ft long and have a CDL and so forth. Turn your head instead.

I for one find it much easier to get a feel for the car's dimensions using mirrors and not half-breaking my neck trying to look backwards. It's all preference really but don't go trying to say using mirrors are an incorrect way to do it.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[dosquatch]

Oh, for Christ's sake, you're not turning around and staring over your shoulder, you're doing a quick eye flick to determine whether the space is occupied by A) air, or B) something large, metal, and opaque that may do significant body damage if you run into it. If this takes you longer than a fraction of a second, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't count the number of times that I've almost side-swiped someone driving in my blind spot.

You are a fucking idiot. Move your head a little bit and actually check for a car. If someone's trying to pass you, they will inevitably be in your 'blind' spot at some point. Next time pay attention before you kill us all.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[jasonhamilton]

you don't want to see your door at all. if you need to see it, move your head closer to the window when backing up.

properly adjusted side view mirrors also have the bonus of not blinding you when it's night time and there's someone behind you with HIDs.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[PitaBred]

Ok, I look over my right shoulder... how do I figure out how close I am to the 1' high curb(maybe you spell it kerb?) on my left hand side? Stick my head out the window over my left shoulder? Or just use my mirror, and still be able to see cars beside me when I'm driving because I have it set to as wide an angle as possible while still keeping the very edge of my car in view?

I may be an asshole, but I've never caused an accident in well over 10 years of driving, and I've stopped a couple chain-reactions from people rear-ending me while I was stopped from going any further because I stopped back far enough. I also quite often drive larger vehicles where the ONLY way to look behind you is through the side mirrors (ever think of that, retard?), and trailers, which are a little bit of a trick to back up and pretty much REQUIRE you to use the mirrors in many cases.

In short, go fuck yourself, and have a nice day!

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[PitaBred]

And then there are the people that catch up to you and then just stay in your blind spot (they must think they're geese or something... definitely birdbrains of some sort). Happens a lot to me, driving lots of miles on the highway. I can only imagine what it's like for truckers who have even more limited visibility (you do realize some vehicles don't afford you the full 360 view by turning your head, right?). If you didn't watch them come all the way up and stop, they're almost invisible. It's not entirely his fault necessarily.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[2.7182]

A "standard automobile" may not be shipped from the factory with anything other than a flat mirror on the driver's side. This is not true in Europe or in Japan. Trucks and Buses are another story. And none of It is determined by state - this is federal law. See, for example

this DOT report on the topic..

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[NatasRevol]

OS X server licensing not as heinous as MS?

Are you on crack? They're not in the same neighborhood, much less ball park.

All Xserves come with unlimited client licenses. And the OS X Server software comes in two flavors, unlimited clients ($1k) and 10 clients ($500). The 10 client limitation ONLY applies to AFP connections. Everything else - mail, web, smb, ftp - is sill unlimited.

Try putting 500 users on an Exchange server. Try putting 500 users on OS X Server. Spend the extra money on an all expenses paid conference trip to Vegas for two weeks.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Pfhor]

Licensing isn't even in the same planet compared to MS.

unlimited license of server is $1000. it COMES with the xserve.

Maintenance (3 years of free upgrades, for 10.5-6, etc.) is another $1000, and entirely worth it.

So initial license purchase on top of the hardware is $1000 if you want 3 years of major versions of os x server. From past experience, that saves you $1000, because 2 more updates will happen in the next 3 years.

You are looking at $4,000 from apple vs $4313 from dell, but the dell only comes with 5 CALs (bare minimum 1u dual dual core xenon servers).

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[unixfan]

Personally I always set my mirrors to point clear into the lanes on each side of the car.
I'm less concerned over parking than side swiping someone. Then if I need to see the side of the car, which is only while backing into some tight spot. Which is of course done at the slowest possible speed.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[MBGMorden]

Every DMV tester I know of would fail someone who backed up using their mirrors. Check your driving handbook from your local DMV. Dollars to donuts it says to physically turn around and look while backing up.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[MrCopilot]

I don't know the law but I'd assume thats why manufacturers haven't improved them. Of course, if somebody (the manufacturers) lobbied hard enough for it, I'm sure the DOT would change their mind.

It kind of works the other way round, see the DOT/NHSA issues safety standards that manufacturers must follow for automobiles to be sold/driven in the US.

As an example here are the proposed rule changes on convex mirrrors on big pickups.
noticed how long the comment/approval system takes to change this rule.

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/rulings/NPRM-F MVSS/NPRM-RearviewMirrors.html
-snippet-V
Option 1: Cross-View Mirrors

Under the first proposed compliance option, a cross-view mirror system would be required. A cross-view mirror is typically a convex mirror mounted on the driver's side, upper rear corner of a vehicle that is used in conjunction with the driver's side exterior rearview mirror to view the area directly behind a vehicle.

The cross-view mirror would be required to: (1) have no discontinuities in the slope of its surface; (2) be adjustable both in the horizontal and vertical directions; (3) be installed on stable supports on the upper rear corner of the driver's side of the vehicle; (4) have an average radius of curvature of no less than 203 millimeters (mm), and (5) be placed such that the geometric centers of the two mirrors would be separated by no more than 5 m.

We also are proposing test requirements to ensure that the mirror system provides a detection zone that would permit the driver to survey the area behind the vehicle for obstacles before backing. The proposed test requirements would be similar in nature to the school bus mirror test requirements of FMVSS No. 111, which utilize a number of cylinders to simulate objects that would be difficult or impossible to see without the aid of mirrors.

More info on the process here...http://regs.dot.gov/rulemakings/200702/nhts a.htm?type=html

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[MidnightBrewer]

Good advice; I'll have to try that. As for turning around when I back up, I *always* do that, because not only is it the safest, it's also in the driving rules. ;)

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[mpe]

On a more serious note, this beg the questions of what more can be added to the Windows Operating system? Isn't going to be complete at some point? I played around with Vista and there are some like a nice improvements, but I don't see six-years of work or enhancements.

This also applies to MS Office as well. At what point are you getting change for the sake of change?

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Bega]

The DOT is just figuring this out now? Hell, most of us knew this years ago.

Well, isn't it good knowing that a government agency has figured it out now? Usually they realize these things 6 years later, after the upgrade.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[JonathanR]

If you set your mirrors wide enough, you don't end up with any blind spot. Next time you're in the car, just note the duplication/overlap of visual information between the three mirrors.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[jaavaaguru]

I think the upgrade from Office 2000 was change for the sake of change, but then there may be some new features that are not the ones I use. They should concentrate on making numbered lists work. From what I've seen there's no great improvement in this area in Office 2007. I'd also love if they got rid of easy ways to randomly change fonts. That's what styles are for.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[nurb432]

Dont forget the upgrading of the hardware, that also takes time and expense.

I figure the 'upgrade' to vista will take longer then it did from 2k to XP. 5 years more likely.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Blackknight]

If you have a car like mine (Jetta) it's a lot easier to see where you are using the mirrors, I still turn around but it's hard to see out the back windows.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[JimDaGeek]

I don't know why you were mod'ed "Offtopic". Some people need more brain cells. However, you are certainly allowed to have curved glass on a driver-side mirror. Did you ever see a fish-eye mirror? You can go into any car parts store and get a stick-on fish-eye. I don't think anyone would suggest that a fish-eye mirror is not curved. I don't know what the GP was talking about.

Heck, I drove a few bigger delivery trucks when I was going through college here in the USA. The trucks had a big rectangular flat-mirror and a big fish-eye mirror on both sides.

I haven't looked up the law, maybe it is illegal to only have a fish-eye, curved mirror on the driver side. However, they are certainly not illegal here in the USA as an adjunct mirror. I have one on my mini-van.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[DeepZenPill]

Good luck with Intuit porting to linux. QB Enterprise hardly works right on Win32.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[MikeBabcock]

Thank you for that. You've alleviated my having to rant about it too.

That said, check over your shoulder when you change lanes please. I'm sick and tired of people who think their mirrors are all they need to drive.

If you can't look over your shoulder to see what's in the other lane, don't change lanes (or don't drive).

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[skarphace]

Every DMV tester I know of would fail someone who backed up using their mirrors. Check your driving handbook from your local DMV. Dollars to donuts it says to physically turn around and look while backing up.

I used the mirrors in my test, didn't get penalized. That's still besides the point. After your test, it's a whole new world buddy. There's no law telling you how to back up your car.

As a webmaster

[pembo13]

I wish they would at least move to IE7 if they are not going to move to Firefox/Mozilla. To stay with IE6 is just unfair.

Re:As a webmaster

[Anonymous Coward]

To stay with IE6 is just unfair.

It's not unfair, it's just plain stupid.

Re:As a webmaster

[Anonymous Coward]

To say there is reason specifically to not upgrade from IE6 is basically saying that they've developed a bunch of IE6-only web applications (with a bunch of ActiveX controls that require lax security settings perhaps.. or maybe just by developers that have never visited w3.org and have used Microsoft's [wrong] implementation of Javascript/HTML/CSS). They've screwed themselves on this one.. eventually as IE6 security updates stop coming (if they haven't already?) they're going to have endless problems when their users continue to use it to browse the internet..

Re:As a webmaster

[Anonymous Coward]

IE7 is a complete heap of shit. Someone should have told Microsoft that not all .html files come from a remote host. Some of them are supposed to reside on the local hard drive.

Every time IE7 spews pointless ActiveX security warnings on .html files that contain no active content whatsoever, God kills a gnu.

Re:As a webmaster

[Chris whatever]

IE7 sucks like shit, other than it's a copy from Firefox, it has numerous issues with other product mainly Outlook 2003 and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It is irrational to install IE7 without testing it with other software, adding too much securities can seriously impair web base application and if you deploy this on a large number of user that uses those web base application, better get ready to do overtime getting that first stupid setting setup page and all the pop-up and active x blocker done, the user wont do it.

Re:As a webmaster

[jcr]

IE7 is a complete heap of shit.

Well, since they killed NetScape, why should they care?

-jcr

Re:As a webmaster

[GundamFan]

I know shoddy IE6 only (activeX using in most cases) programs are the biggest reason we haven't pushed the upgrade... that and the way it locks down network drive security (I can't fathom why they would bother with screwing around with that).

Re:As a webmaster

[Bert64]

Hopefully when all these apps get rewritten, they will be written for any browser rather than being tied to ie7, so that they don't have this same issue again in the future. Or maybe they'l never learn...

Re:As a webmaster

[Dread Pirate Skippy]

You have to hit Alt to make them appear in IE7. Same for all explorer windows on Vista. You can set them to always appear with a checkbox.

Re:As a webmaster

[swansontec]

IE7 may have its user interface flaws, but it does offer increased support for standards. Not enough, mind you, but better than its predecessor. As long as people hold back on the upgrade to IE7 (or Firefox / Opera), the Internet at large will remain stunted. Simple things, like using transparent PNG's, will suddenly become possible once enough people switch. I'm tired of writing ugly, hackish HTML and CSS just to work around the flaws in IE6.

Re:As a webmaster

[leighklotz]

>As long as people hold back on the upgrade to IE7 (or Firefox / Opera), the Internet at large will remain stunted.
You should write W3C and ask for them to proceed with plans for moving the web forward.
Currently, they've bowed to pressure from WHATWG (a group formed by incumbent minor browser vendors) to require future upgrades to all be backwards compatible, including specifying rules for parsing broken web pages and requiring all future standards to support them.

Curiously, there's never a call from these same quarters for laxity in JavaScript syntax, nor any complaints there.

Re:As a webmaster

[monkeydo]

Huh? How can the websites be designed to run with any browser that will ever exist in the future? Isn't it up to the browser designers to make their browsers backwards compatible (or not)? How could anyone possibly know what new standards there will be before IE 8 comes out, or what new brilliant security measures will be implemented?

Re:As a webmaster

[kennygraham]

Currently, they've bowed to pressure from WHATWG (a group formed by incumbent minor browser vendors) to require future upgrades to all be backwards compatible, including specifying rules for parsing broken web pages and requiring all future standards to support them.

Since when is XHTML2 going to be backwards compatible? From W3C:

such strict element-wise backwards compatibility is no longer necessary ... Much of XHTML 2 works already in existing browsers; much, but not all: just as when forms and tables were added to HTML, and people had to wait for new version of browsers before being able to use the new facilities, some parts of XHTML 2, principally XForms and XML Events, still require user agents that understand that functionality.

And sure they're specifying a rule for parsing broken web pages... they're specifying that they shouldn't be parsed at all.

Re:As a webmaster

[kosmosik]

> I wish they would at least move to IE7 if they are not going to
> move to Firefox/Mozilla. To stay with IE6 is just unfair.

I am seasoned webmaster and I actually do not share your point of view. I am all about standards but IE7 still fucks them and I won't ever belive that M$ likes standards so I am not into it.

From practical point of view right now with IE6 things are quirky but at least we have hacks for it and our websites work with IE6. I usualy use conditional comments (M$ "innovation") to serve different styles for IE6 and it works... Now IE7 is out and you still need to do *more* additional styles specifically for it.

If M$ wants to follow standards how about they fucking drop "conditional comments" (there is no such thing according to standards), make their browser respect the standards fully. This way my pre-IE7 sites would work with IE7 without requiring modifications.

I know that alternative browsers are not perfect. But I can say that from my experience when I do design a website and test it under Firefox most of the time it works the same in Opera and Safari.

So I don't know how it is better to have yet another IE7 version that you need to design specifically for?

***
As a disclaimer I have to state that I do mostly basic stuff like HTML and CSS styling. I don't even try to think what other quirks with DOM/JS new version of Internet Explorer carries.

Re:As a webmaster

[egreshko]

Sorry, it is neither unfair or stupid. It is prudent.
The upgrade to IE7 on XP has broken the ability to scan documents on HP wireless printers. Fall back to IE6 and things work fine.

Re:As a webmaster

[JoshJ]

Every time IE7 spews pointless ActiveX security warnings on .html files that contain no active content whatsoever, God kills a gnu.

If that were factual, Microsoft would make sure that all GNUs are extinct the day after the next Patch Tuesday.

Re:As a webmaster

[Phillup]

IE7 may have its user interface flaws, but it does offer increased support for standards. Compared to what? The worst browser on the market?

Oh... wait...

Re:As a webmaster

[honkycat]

That's the whole point of published standards. Web designers should design to the standard rather than to the implementation quirks of any particular browser. If they design their apps to adhere to the standards rather than to the implementation quirks of a particular browser (or, worse, to the non-standard extensions used in a particular browser) then any browser can easily maintain backward compatibility with the standard.

This does usually limit the availability of some features, but I've rarely seen must-have features that can't be achieved in a standard way.

Re:As a webmaster

[pembo13]

IT's not better, but it is already there, and is slightly more sane than IE6.

Re:As a webmaster

[pete6677]

Bill Gates has never understood and will never understand the internet.

Re:As a webmaster

[ChunderDownunder]

It's an issue of browsers not implementing the current standards fully nor correctly.

Browsers are still playing catchup to full XHTML/CSS compliance.

'Javascript' is a moving target, with incompatible dialects in each browser. ECMA standardized the language some years back but vendors keep adding new features that aren't available in other browsers yet.

It would be nice if web designers could at least use a baseline of available web standards of 2006 and know that all the major browsers would support them correctly. i.e. CSS2.x, ECMA-262 v3 and E4X.

Sadly, today's web applications tend to implement workarounds specific to IE and firefox (gmail for example), leaving other browsers as unsupported.

So it's not about designing websites to run with any browser that will ever exist in the future but a battle creating ones that run using the standards of today. :( IE 6 is 5 1/2 years old and should be regarded as a legacy platform.

Re:As a webmaster

[kabz]

My wife works at a CPA. IE7 breaks some of the commercial VB-based apps that do timekeeping and client billing.

Solution: Don't upgrade to IE7.

I work with energy companies. IE7 breaks various web-based training at clients.

Solution: Don't upgrade to IE7.

Same story with other miscellaneous aspects of Vista. I remember similar things when XP came out, but just not this many problems.

Re:As a webmaster

[Machtyn]

Hewlett Packard scanning software doesn't work with much, actually. Ever tried to use "Scan-to-email" into Thunderbird, or some other e-mail client? It won't work. You are stuck to Outlook/OE. HP - Fueling the monopolistic practices.

What's that noise?

[HangingChad]

It was like the sound of thousands of MSFT reps all calling their elected representatives at once.

Re:What's that noise?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It was like the sound of thousands of MSFT reps all calling their elected representatives at once."

You misspelled "sending a campaign check to" and "sponsored."

Re:What's that noise?

[miskatonic alumnus]

Nahh. They send e-mails filled with viruses, trojans, & worms. Shortly afterwards they send another e-mail saying "See, this is what happens when you don't upgrade!"

Fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to any Microsoft software products."

Re:Fixed.

[RingDev]

Someone has never used Windows ME.

-Rick

Re:Fixed.

[ckaminski]

I used WinME in a small office setting, and aside from ONE old DOS-based app that required share.com to run to increase stack space and ME removing that little tool, I had ZERO issues with it. It served a purpose. It put people on notice that XP was coming, and changes were afoot: get with the program or get left behind, pure 100% DOS compatibility is gone. WIN32 or bust.

In that regard, 6 years later, I think it worked phenomenally well.

Re:Fixed.

[ivan256]

Let me guess. You run a video editing company that does a lot of digital overlays?

Re:Fixed.

[ckaminski]

Nope. Bank Account Manager for Peachtree Classic Accounting. Fairly mundane...

Seriously, so what?

[throx]

What this is really saying is that IT in the DOT wants all their systems to be running the same set of software. Wouldn't this just make sense from an efficiency point of view? I mean, they probably have bans on running MacOS 7.1, Gentoo and OS2 4.0 as well so I don't get the big news.

Did anyone seriously think large enterprise level customers would be jumping to Vista immediately, or even worse, letting their employees arbitrarily upgrade their own machines?

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the military has decided that there is no IE7 or Vista till at least August 07, and even then, it isn't a guaranteed that they'll decide to go ahead and allow it.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Muad'Dave]

MOV AX,4c00h
INT 21h

Terminate with response code, right?

Re:Seriously, so what?

[div_2n]

It is no small deal when a government agency specifically bans products internally for very specific reasons. Case in point is that we do a lot of business with the US Government. There are websites we MUST use for business purposes. IE7 specifically doesn't work with how they have been designed. This means that as IT Manager, I have instituted the same policy (IE7 ban) here.

The point is that there is a trickle down effect. Why do you think MS has fought the ODF issue in Mass. so hard?

Re:Seriously, so what?

[PopeRatzo]

I'm comforted by the military's decision not to upgrade to Vista, IE7 or Office 07 until later in the year or when service packs start coming out.

After a horrible experience with Vista on a brand new system, I've made the same decision. For the last few new MS 0Ss, I've been right on top of new versions, but this time they've really pulled a boner.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Overly Critical Guy]

What this is really saying is that IT in the DOT wants all their systems to be running the same set of software.

No, what it is saying--stated right there near the top of the article--is that the feds see no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista and that there are actually reasons not to upgrade. Your attempt to dismiss this ban with comparisons to MacOS 7.1 (huh?) is cute but irrelevant. Sales to the feds are important to Microsoft's bottom line, and this hurts it.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[NC-17]

I take it you're not the sort of person who wants to get "right on top" of one of those now, huh? :)

You see, upgrading a Microsoft OS is much like making love to beautiful woman...

Re:Seriously, so what?

[berashith]

Yes, but there is always some Jackass in marketing who loves having the newest bells and whistles on day one, and lo and behold, it isnt always backwards compatible. Then when they cant get things to their friends that they are showing off, their friends start pushing IT for upgrades to office out of need to collaborate. Of course, telling Jackass #1 to remove his crap and use a standard is difficult if there was no policy against this in the first place.

This kind of moratorium is better business sense than I would ever expect out of government.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Shadow Wrought]

Not just any Department either. But the one that is specifically taksed with investigating and reducing crashes;-)

Re:Seriously, so what?

[rizzo320]

There could be more to this statement than just a disclosure of the ban to the public. I'm guessing that although there are over 15,000 computers being used in the DOT, they are in many different offices across the country, being managed by many different people. In many cases, there are regional "federal buildings" with several different departments enclosed in one building (DOT, FBI, HUD, IRS etc) that are maintained by one IT group (I had a friend working in this type of situation). So, while the DOT might be banning this software because of incompatibility, other federal departments might not be. This bulletin makes sure those support people know that just because one office down the hall might be Vista ready, they (the DOT), are not. In addition, maintenance contracts with Microsoft may specify that certain upgrades are available for use already (they may have received licenses of Vista and Office 2007), and this might be clarification that despite those licenses being available and delivered, that they shouldn't be rolled out yet.

It looks like your "trickle down" effect might be working internally inside the government as well. The article states the FAA made a similar declaration. Other government agencies might follow suit if interoperability is important (then again this is the government ;-) ). Most likely, however, this will be delayed revenue, rather than lost revenue for Microsoft.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's far easier and less painful to do if you're seriously drunk.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Tablizer]

Further, many agencies just want time to get master configurations etc. all ready and tested before switching over to Vista. Why move to it fast if there is no compelling reason? And gov't tends to move a bit slower than commercial such that their conversion curve will probably be longer. This is not really about MS being bad. (Well, maybe they are, but this is not really an effect of that.)

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Dragonslicer]

You see, upgrading a Microsoft OS is much like making love to beautiful woman...

Except that there are plenty of people on Slashdot that have experience upgrading a Microsoft OS.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[penguinbrat]

It may just be me not keeping up with every bit of IT news over the years, but I don't recall ever hearing about "an indefinite moratorium" against any of those platforms. Although, I do recall various tidbits here and there about such-n-such 'considering' such-n-such only to be "re-sold" in the end on M$, of course by M$ - not because the platforms didn't have something superior to offer. Besides, with Vienna already in the works supposedly, apparently even the US government can't see a reason to decrease productivity, spend thousands if not millions on upgrades and waste time and money on a defective design especially if the current OS won't EOL before the next one is out...

Re:Seriously, so what?

[rapidweather]

An individual or family that has a fairly well-behaved Windows XP computer, decides not to run out and buy Windows Vista, or a new computer that has Vista preinstalled.
Mostly because of the price, and secondly, because the Windows XP computer works well for them. And, they paid a good price for it, and would like to see if they can get some more miles out of it. A third, and perhaps major reason is that they are unclear as to "just what Vista does", besides look pretty.
It would be Big News if Microsoft could say that Vista is a secure operating system, and that Vista spells the end of the viruses and trojans war.

The point is that there is a trickle down effect.

No one paid any attention to the individual or family that "decides not to run out and buy Windows Vista"

But, a major government department that has perhaps thousands of computers, making this decision not to upgrade, and giving reasons, gets everyones attention.

That individual or family now doesn't feel all alone, the U.S. DOT is on the same page as them.
It's a matter of money for the individual, and a matter of money for the U.S. DOT, not to mention the other reasons they have, that are much more serious for Microsoft.
  Everyone thinks the Government has plenty of money, and "buys $100.00 toothbrushes", etc.
Money to burn, literally. So, perhaps their reasons are more about the "other problems", rather than the money.

What large organization or Government entity will be next?

Please don't let this story get on Drudge Report.
Yes, I know Drudge Report has a little text box where one can send in story links.
Don't all rush in and do that at once!

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

....And except that she's the one pulling the boner....

Re:Seriously, so what?

[wizzard2k]

You see, upgrading a Microsoft OS is much like making love to beautiful woman...

Please rephrase your simile. This is /. We *may* have done the former, but not likely the latter ;)

A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[eldavojohn]

Ok, so the Department of Transportation can't make a business case for it. Big deal.

Allow me to strike some real fear into Microsoft. I work for a large Fortune 500 company with six digits of employees. While it's not our primary product, we write software as a lot of companies do.

When IE7 came out, I decided to use my work legal machine to install it to try it out. This resulted in a next day 7 am nastygram from my system administrator stating that I am authorized to install any software that isn't married to the kernel. Not only were we told not to use it, we were threatened not to install it OR ELSE I wouldn't be able to enter my time or access shared community sites internal to the company.

Because a lot of our company's tools don't work very nicely inside of it. So I'm still using IE6 and my company sure isn't going to upgrade my MS Office suite. Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?

So what would scare Microsoft more? The fact that a government department isn't using it or the fact that many companies like mine are still writing stuff for the old software hence forcing our customers to stick with IE6 or any version of Firefox?

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Billosaur]

Because a lot of our company's tools don't work very nicely inside of it. So I'm still using IE6 and my company sure isn't going to upgrade my MS Office suite. Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?

And you can make a business case for that. Face it -- you develop for your company based (hopefully) on a set of standards for what the company will use as its backbone technology. I worked at a Fortune 500 once, and they held on to Netscape 4.7 for the longest time, because it was deployed everywhere (globally), and everything was designed to work for it. It wasn't the greatest browser, but it was still better than IE5 at some critical things.

Change comes slowly at big companies/organizations, because it's due to economies of scale. The more machines you have to upgrade, the more applications you have to re-write to support the upgrades, the more the bottom line takes a pounding. Even if you manage to pull off a major, world-wide upgrade, you're going to spend the next couple of years fending off bugs that will turn up every day. Eventually you will get it stable -- just in time for the "next big thing".

Companies cannot afford to go chasing every new technology or upgrade that comes along, without risking the stability that IT works so hard to create.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[kosmosik]

> Did I mention I write web applications and I can only
> test them in IE6 and Firefox?

1. You can use something like VMWare Server and running it to test under different OSes/browsers etc. In fact that is what most people do.

2. I belive you can run IE7 without installing it. I've seen guides what you need to do make it work without actually installing it (just extracting files to your choosen folder, applying some patches on these files and it is it).

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Red Flayer]

So what would scare Microsoft more? The fact that a government department isn't using it or the fact that many companies like mine are still writing stuff for the old software hence forcing our customers to stick with IE6 or any version of Firefox?

Or maybe all the DOT contractors who now won't be using Vista and IE7? It's not just a government department, it's all the companies that provide services to that department. Never mind the role government plays as an example for many businesses to follow wrt implementation.

E.g., if the not-so-adept[1] US government knows better than to install Vista and IE7, wtf would my company do so? What is the compelling case for implementing?

Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?

Sounds like your company doesn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground. Have you considered finding an employer who isn't shooting themselves in the foot?

[1] on an institutional level. Plenty of individuals are quite adept, but the LCD factor is pretty high in the US Gov.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[LWATCDR]

"Ok, so the Department of Transportation can't make a business case for it. Big deal. "
Oh yes it is.
The US government is Microsoft's biggest single customer.

Yea your company means a lot more than some the local hardware store to Microsoft but the US Government + it's contractors are far more important.
First the DOT next.... The DOD maybe?

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[RetroGeek]

Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?

Well I set up a machine specifically for IE7 testing. This is on an Intranet that is isolated from everything.

After IE7 started it wanted to connect to the MSN site. I waited until it timed out, then set the start page to "about:blank".

The next time IE7 started, it again wanted to connect to MSN. In fact it ALWAYS wants to connect to MSN, regardless of the blank page setting.

Annoying as hell, and what is it reporting to Microsoft that is so important (to Microsoft)?

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[ckaminski]

the LCD factor is common everywhere dude.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[CastrTroy]

I've never understood why companies base so many important applications off stuff like MS Office, or IE, or other apps that they don't have any control over. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to design applications in an environment that isn't as likely to stop working? I hear this complaint all the time. We can't change to OO.o, because we have a critical business app written in Excel. Why do companies continually use office suites and specific web browsers as development platforms? This never ends up being a good idea. I can understand web apps, but there should never be a reason to make the require something in IE or NS or any other browser. Just code them to work with standard HTML/CSS/JS and you won't have all these upgrade problems.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[eldavojohn]

Sounds like your company doesn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground.

Relax, dude. In my defense I revealed that my company is a Fortune 500 company.

And we all know that the definition of a Fortune 500 company is: a large group of people with no clue about technology, their anuses & holes in the ground but with enough bullshit spewing out of their mouths to make Wall Street happy. :-)

One thing that neither you nor I like is the fact that one could be a goddamn genius with computers and end up poor, penniless & homeless on the street. Do not underestimate the power of speaking, presenting, & dressing to satisfy those despicable humans that pay the working man's bills. Just ask Cap'n Crunch.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Red Flayer]

Sorry, I'm a bit... frustrated with inagile companies right now. Management won't let me automate a recurring project that requires each incremental change (around 70/month) to be recorded 6 (!) times in separate Excel and Word files. I'm bangin my head against the wall, since it'd be trivial to do, but "no one here would be able to understand what you did".

That's what I get for consulting.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[ckaminski]

Here's why:

    Mgr B gives Worker B a problem.

    WorkerB struggles with old process, or manual data entry for months on end, and is sick and tired of it. WorkerB struggles for a week or two, and writes some eXcel macros or an Access database to create the dataset he needs based off of some report out of "Insert Big Fracking ERP Here."
    WorkerB shows the boss how he can save 6 hours a day doing analysis, and the whole team ends up using the new eXcel spreadsheet.

    Mgr B. uses Word macros to mine the Excel data to make pretty reports for Sr VP. Jones. Mgr B gets a raise for finding inefficiencies in a shipping network network somewhere, thereby validating all of the above.

    If "Insert Big Fracking ERP Here" tool good ad-hoc reporting tools built into it (aka Crystal?) then maybe a lot of the above would never happen. But it probably would. End users are the best choice for determining what they want and how they want to see it, and no one has created the interface to allow arbitrary SQl to become an Arbitrary Document Formation with ease enough to be useful to the end user.

    Note, even OO.o has built in macro tools. It's the nature of the beast. I'm just dying until I can use GoogleDocs to mine my GoogleDBs.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I think you might be dealing with user error there. I am running IE7 with the most recent updates, and when I have my homepage set to about:blank, it doesn't even try to connect to MSN. This is with both opening up a new browser window, as well as pushing the Home button. Are you sure that you don't have multiple home pages configured?

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[tftp]

I've never understood why companies base so many important applications off stuff like MS Office, or IE, or other apps that they don't have any control over.

Most companies have no control over OO or Firefox either. Companies do not have people who are capable of fetching (CVS, SVN etc.) a year old tree of FF and compiling it and using it and supporting it and being responsible that it works on each and every desktop. A single person doesn't even have enough bandwidth to do that. Companies just buy the stuff they need, and in this particular aspect IE and FF look very much the same.

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to design applications in an environment that isn't as likely to stop working?

Yes, a LAMP would make sense, for example. But in many cases it is easier to put something together by dragging and dropping. IIS is plugged into the whole MSVC, .NET and ASP and SQL infrastructure already. LAMP requires work to get there, if only because there may be fewer documentation or fewer programmers who know the tools. The imagined "support" is another issue - many companies fear using s/w without support, even though the support in many cases is worthless and is never invoked.

We can't change to OO.o, because we have a critical business app written in Excel. Why do companies continually use office suites and specific web browsers as development platforms?

In this case it's easy to answer. Excel was released between 1985 (Mac) and 1987 (PC). OpenOffice did not exist in any meaningful form until what, 2005? I know that StarOffice was around for some time, but hardly anyone dared to use it, and it was much worse than MS Office anyway. Even today's OpenOffice is said to be worse than MS Office in many aspects, but aside from that it's easy to see why a program that had 20 years as an uncontested market leader has entrenched here and there.

Just code them to work with standard HTML/CSS/JS and you won't have all these upgrade problems.

Much of the code is written using libraries and standard pieces which may not work with a newer browser - for example, because your SDK was designed some years before the IE7. And if you upgrade the SDK it will break your other code in many places... it truly makes sense to just not upgrade and be happy.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[samkass]

Interestingly, the US Army's Program Management office for Battle Command seems adamant that everyone move to Vista as quickly as humanly possible. Fun times.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[drinkypoo]

Most companies have no control over OO or Firefox either. Companies do not have people who are capable of fetching (CVS, SVN etc.) a year old tree of FF and compiling it and using it and supporting it and being responsible that it works on each and every desktop. A single person doesn't even have enough bandwidth to do that. Companies just buy the stuff they need, and in this particular aspect IE and FF look very much the same.

Specious, irrelevant argument. If a company wants/needs this, they can contract for it.

We can't change to OO.o, because we have a critical business app written in Excel. Why do companies continually use office suites and specific web browsers as development platforms?

In this case it's easy to answer. Excel was released between 1985 (Mac) and 1987 (PC). OpenOffice did not exist in any meaningful form until what, 2005?

Uh, read the question again. He's not asking why companies use closed office suites. He's asking why they use office suites. OpenOffice is an office suite.

The collaborative nature of social websites is pretty much shit upon by people like you who won't take the time to read the comment before they reply.

Just code them to work with standard HTML/CSS/JS and you won't have all these upgrade problems.

Much of the code is written using libraries and standard pieces which may not work with a newer browser - for example, because your SDK was designed some years before the IE7.

Congratulations on your willful display of ignorance. If you have been following web standards all along, then your pages will display (maybe not identically but close enough) in any modern browser.

Unless you're using a plugin, there is no connection between your browser and any SDK.

The point is that if you write applications as web applications, and you target the standards and not a particular browser, then your application will continue to work. Sometimes this eliminates the possibility of using some kind of cutesy UI metaphor that can only be accomplished with javascript, or flash, or something else, but a well-written web application can ALWAYS degrade to using standard HTML. It might take more page loads, but that's hardly a show stopper.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[cerberusss]

Create a virtual machine and run IE7 in it.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Snover]

It sounds like, since you never let it go there, it keeps trying to go to the IE7 "First Start" page, which, contrary to all logic, is not a local page but is instead hosted on an MSN server. This page allows you to..er..change default IE settings. Seems rather stupid and insecure to me, but hey.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[tftp]

Specious, irrelevant argument. If a company wants/needs this, they can contract for it.

A requirement to spend money on a contractor, as opposed to using a free product, is hardly irrelevant. It makes F/OSS software more expensive!

Uh, read the question again. He's not asking why companies use closed office suites. He's asking why they use office suites.

What should they use then? Write their own clone of Excel, for one specific purpose? Have you given any thought whatsoever to what it would take and how much it will cost to maintain?

Sometimes this eliminates the possibility of using some kind of cutesy UI metaphor that can only be accomplished with javascript, or flash, or something else, but a well-written web application can ALWAYS degrade to using standard HTML.

It often requires to have a duplicate set of code that does the same thing completely differently. The cost of development goes up. Who is going to pay for that? We are talking about businesses here, not artists or scientists who may be legitimately perfectionists.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Billosaur]

The point is that if you write applications as web applications, and you target the standards and not a particular browser, then your application will continue to work. Sometimes this eliminates the possibility of using some kind of cutesy UI metaphor that can only be accomplished with javascript, or flash, or something else, but a well-written web application can ALWAYS degrade to using standard HTML. It might take more page loads, but that's hardly a show stopper.

The problem is this push to incorporate new technologies. I resist this trend every chance I get. I despise Flash, and while I find AJAX intriguing, I tend to think it introduces elements that can be hard to control. I've always been of the opinion that a web user, whether looking at a web site or using a web application wants two things: 1) to see the data they are looking for and 2) ease of use. Stick to standard technologies and you never have to fear about someone upgrading some part of the infrastructure that causes your apps to break.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Midnight Thunder]

And you can make a business case for that. Face it -- you develop for your company based (hopefully) on a set of standards for what the company will use as its backbone technology. I worked at a Fortune 500 once, and they held on to Netscape 4.7 for the longest time, because it was deployed everywhere (globally), and everything was designed to work for it. It wasn't the greatest browser, but it was still better than IE5 at some critical things.

I must admit I have been in similar situations as the grandparent post. Heck, in some cases I wasn't allowed to have admin rights to a machine I was developing on, or I wouldn't get support. Generally when in situations like this I usually tell them I am quite happy supporting my own machine, since its not as if the usually know what to do with a development system anyhow. This is not to disrespect good system admins, but I usually find that those applying limits are scared of being presented with any real world issues.

In other situations when you can't get the necessary software installed, because of admins who don't want to understand, I delegate the problem to my boss. If you put things in terms of "I need x, because I don't have it I might aswell be sitting at home", then any smart person would make sure a solution gets found, as for the stupid people, well if you are surrounded by too many then its time to change job.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[drinkypoo]

What should they use then? Write their own clone of Excel, for one specific purpose? Have you given any thought whatsoever to what it would take and how much it will cost to maintain?

Sigh. The question IN FULL is why they are using an office suite as a software development environment and application platform. 99% of the applications "written" in excel would have been far better developed as a standalone application and excel offers no functionality whatsoever over roviding the same functionality in a web app.

It often requires to have a duplicate set of code that does the same thing completely differently. The cost of development goes up. Who is going to pay for that? We are talking about businesses here, not artists or scientists who may be legitimately perfectionists.

Because when you use a system that is not an application environment as if it were one, hidden costs rear their heads. Your application won't work in newer or older versions of the software, for example.

You're assuming that it is cheaper to do business this way, and in the short term that's correct - and that's okay if you don't plan to survive beyond the short term. If you want to actually be around for the long haul, you have to be farsighted, not exceptionally shortsighted.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[Karzz1]

"2. I belive you can run IE7 without installing it. I've seen guides what you need to do make it work without actually installing it (just extracting files to your choosen folder, applying some patches on these files and it is it)."

Honest question; is this legal? I haven't taken the time to read the book that is IE7's EULA, but I suspect that this would violate the licensing to use IE7. Anyone able to clarify?

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[cyber-vandal]

That describes part of my job perfectly. If I had better tools installed on my desktop I'd use them but the only thing resembling a language on your average Windows XP box is VBA and VBScript.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[tftp]

The question IN FULL is why they are using an office suite as a software development environment and application platform. 99% of the applications "written" in excel would have been far better developed as a standalone application and excel offers no functionality whatsoever over roviding the same functionality in a web app.

To clarify my earlier response: because Excel and Word were explicitly marketed and sold as scripting platforms for businesses to write their little applications in. Remember the MS Office logo - a puzzle? That's how they specifically marketed the thing, for ease of mixing and matching. MS Office does many things, and it would be amazingly expensive to redo even some of them that you need in a standalone application.

Furthermore, if we look at state of APIs around 1995 - when most of those VB apps got written - back there we had nothing at all that would be able to create and maintain a document or a spreadsheet. For example, your business wants a document generator that creates standard letters, and you want five combo boxes for various options. It would be not easy to create a document that does this right; it's possible through the RTF, but then you'd need to open the file in Word anyway (to print) so why not to generate it right there?

Word and Excel are platforms for building applications. Feel free to call them bad, stupid, ugly and limited, since they are. But they are also powerful - you can do a lot of office automation with them, and it would cost much more (like 100x more) to write a comparable app in C++ or some other language. These automation functions were standard, available and easy to use.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[CastrTroy]

So download and install Netbeans and the Java SDK, or get SharpDevelop if you prefer .Net. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to make a business case of I can save 20+ hours a month, all for the low cost of $0.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[jp10558]

I have to say, this argument vis a vis support is bullshit. Now that I've actually been there and done that in the working world for a year, I feel I can say that with more authority than I ever have before. I have several "supported" produtcs - Symantec AV (with a platnium contract no less), Acronis True Image with their paid priority support, Opera browser with it's paid yearly support, and I could go on but I'm tired, oh there is Windows, but does anyone call MS?

Anyway, I also have several OSS products I use - OCSNG, GLPI, Firefox and Thunderbird etc.

So, let's see. SAV decides to eat AutoIT Scripts and Thunderbird mailboxes. Ok, call up support and are told... Update to the latest version. Uh huh, cause that works so well with SAV Server. Then the thunderbird issue is a "known issue" that isn't fixable... That was helpful, thanks.

Acronis True Image w/ Universal Restore. UR is awesome, except once it gets my XP booted on different hardware - THE MOUSE AND KEYBOARD NEVER WORK! So 2 weeks of e-mail, phone calls, sending images back and forth... and they say they know what the problem is. Great but it's code problem. Nice, but really, not useful. No ETA to a possible fix.

Opera - report problems... Oh, we've told our "Open the Web Group". They will talk to MediaMax. Look, if FireFox can do it, it's not ActiveX - so why can't you make it work? Why no, oh it uses feature Z, we plan to support that in 9.25. That I can live with, but oh, we'll talk to them. And nothing happens. Still doesn't work. Wow, I paid for what? (To support the company in this case as mostly I like the browser, but their support isn't better and frequently worse than the free support on their forums).

Actually, let me reiterate that - I often get faster responses, with the same or more info, and sometimes with workarounds from user forums than I do from paid support offerings. And the user forums are free!

Look, I can go to the OSS versions forums and hope for responses just like I can with the paid products... So more and more, I'm thinking, if there is an OSS piece of software that does X, lets save the upfront costs if I have to spend the same labor either way. Or let's at least test it and see if it's useable, along with all the commercial offerings.

Maybe my problem is I've been working with the wrong companies, but I cannot remember the last time (if ever) I as a home user or now at work have ever actually gotten something solved or fixed by calling tech support. So I no longer count support as a benefit.

Now, for Autodesk, we do have a consulting company called Adraft that helps us out, so far in my experiance (which is limited, I'm not the main Autodesk support contact) they've had a 50% hit rate, so maybe that makes them awesome in comparison, but it still leaves me underwhelmed.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[kabz]

Welcome to being a consultant !

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[mandie]

Oh, XP was finally allowed on regular unclassified US Army computers in Europe with Internet access around 2004, and didn't become required on all regular desktops until summer 2005 (I think).

I think it's gonna be awhile till you see Vista on very many production DoD systems...

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[LWATCDR]

I was thinking more about Office than windows.
If the US Gov ever went to OpenOffice people in Redmond would be jumping out of windows.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[cyber-vandal]

So you're suggesting that I get myself sacked for installing unauthorised software? Thanks for the useless advice but I think I'll pass.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[CastrTroy]

What i'm saying is that you should get it approved. It's not hard to make a business case if you can show that it will save you money, while costing the company absolutely nothing.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[cyber-vandal]

Sorry I didn't mean to be rude. I thought you were suggesting that I break the IT security policy. Programming isn't my primary job, so it would be hard to make a business case to install programming tools when VBA is already there. I don't know if Java can automate MS Office stuff in any case.

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[drinkypoo]

To clarify my earlier response: because Excel and Word were explicitly marketed and sold as scripting platforms for businesses to write their little applications in.

Yes, and Beer is marketed as if it will bring you many beautiful women with large breasts who will be impressed by the brand of beer that you drink, when in reality it is dramatically more likely to turn you into a drooling fucktard who pinches asses and gets ejected from clubs. If you have a point here, I'd appreciate if you made it.

Furthermore, if we look at state of APIs around 1995 - when most of those VB apps got written - back there we had nothing at all that would be able to create and maintain a document or a spreadsheet. For example, your business wants a document generator that creates standard letters, and you want five combo boxes for various options.

Putting a dialog or some buttons in to build a document is really not an example of what I'm talking about at all.

I'm talking about actual complex applications, not just documents that will auto-insert some content. And people do build them in Excel and sometimes even Word. And it is stupid.

As a U.S. taxpayer ...

[LaughingCoder]

I say "thank you" to the DOT. It's not often we catch a break.

Re:As a U.S. taxpayer ...

[Phillup]

I say "thank you" to the DOT. It's not often we catch a break.

What are you talking about? There are breaks everywhere. You can use EXCLAMATION POINTs and QUESTION MARKs to mark a break. For shorter breaks, there are COMMAs. DOTs are not the only way to catch a break. Dude... this is the web.

Try <br> instead.

;-)

Re:As a U.S. taxpayer ...

[kjkeefe]

It's /> you insensitive clod!

does not compute!

[Denial93]

MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
But MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
But MS is bad!
But the government never does anything right!
*head explodes*

Re:does not compute!

[FriendComputer]

Perhaps if Vista came with a free Frogurt, they'd be more inclined to adopt?

Re:does not compute!

[spun]

I have Ultraviolet clearance, and have been tasked by The Computer with tracking down cursed frogurt. Do you have form 114C-B79 verifying the uncursed status of that frogurt, citizen?

Why it's news

[truthsearch]

I'm sure some are wondering why this is news. The US government is Microsoft's biggest customer, by far. If many agencies cut back on Microsoft purchases it will hurt Microsoft a lot. I would imagine one department's decision may set a precedent for others. And even if not, many investors watch for government spending news when deciding Microsoft's stock value. So any change in government policy can have huge implications for Microsoft.

Re:Why it's news

[TubeSteak]

If many agencies cut back on Microsoft purchases it will hurt Microsoft a lot. I would imagine one department's decision may set a precedent for others.

Well, according to TFA, this applies to 15,000 DOT computers and 45,000 FAA computers.

I'm sure there will be similar stories as more Government Agencies say "Our main problem is that Program X doesn't work on Vista," but is 60k boxes really something to worry about?

The DOT's ban on Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Office 2007 applies to 15,000 computer users at DOT proper who are currently running the Windows XP Professional operating system.

In other words: the ban (AFAIK) only applies to the head office. Ditto for the FAA

Re:Why it's news

[smcdow]

There is no US civilian nor military agency that wants to be the first one to adopt Vista. It's much easier to take a "wait and see" attitude than to actually pull the trigger and have it blow up in their face.

Of course, if they're ALL taking a "wait and see" attitude, then Vista adoption will be rather slow.

Re:Why it's news

[Ogive17]

Sure Microsoft may be missing out on some income, but the DOT isn't going away from Microsoft, just not upgrading to the most current version. So the DOT still has to pay for all of their liscenses.

Re:Why it's news

[davper]

The fact that a government agency is not upgrading to Vista is not going to hurt MS Revenue. MS offers a yearly enterprise licensing system at a fixed cost per user.

This is the licensing that my company of 10,000 uses. I can upgrade a Win2K machine to XP for no additional cost. The same goes for any other MS App.

I am sure many companies are just like mine. They usually wait a year or 2 before upgrading to wait for all the bug fixes. I guarantee you my company won't even think about Vista or MSO2007 until 2009.

Re:Why it's news

[truthsearch]

The XP licenses were already purchased. The only thing they may be paying Microsoft for is support. And they'd pay that whether or not they're on Vista. So Microsoft is missing out on licensing income. If other departments do the same they'll miss millions of dollars in license income.

Re:Why it's news

[Prophet of Nixon]

Well, I don't know about the whole government, but most of DoD uses Enterprise Licensing Agreements. These are contracts that provide access to classes of products rather than specific versions (say, 'desktop windows OS'). These run for multi-year periods before being renewed. Under an ELA, If you have XP, you are entitled to Vista IF you want it. Otherwise, you continue paying the license fee to keep the XP (OS) seat. This means that if no ELA customers adopt Vista, it doesn't effect MS at all, at least not until the ELA ends and is up for renewal.

Re:Why it's news

[Frosty Piss]

I'm sure some are wondering why this is news. The US government is Microsoft's biggest customer, by far. If many agencies cut back on Microsoft purchases it will hurt Microsoft a lot.

Vista is a consumer OS. Since only last year, agencies like the Air Force standardized on a custom build of XP Pro, I wouldn't expect to see Vista for a few years. While the Government does spend a lot of money with MS on desktop OS licenses, most of their expenditures with MS are for back-end things that include for example MS SQL Server, and other server infrastructure. These things are as yet not influenced by Vista. I might add, we also are a very big Oracle customer as well.

Re:Why it's news

[truthsearch]

That's interesting. So if they stay on XP for say 5 more years, they keep paying license fees to use it? That must grow to be a very expensive license per machine. And if they stay on XP for 10 years, let's say past the product's life cycle, do they still pay license fees for it? Or are they somehow obligated to upgrade?

Re:Why it's news

[Prophet of Nixon]

Well, the annual license cost is smaller than purchasing the license. If I remember the figures right, over a 6 year period the cost of any ELA product is roughly retail. However, if a newer product comes out during those 6 years, the upgrade option is included without additional cost. And at the end, should the decide to abandon the ELA, they keep all license options they have and just don't ever accrue new ones. Sort of like buying software as an annuity. I do wish that the 6 year cost reflected a discount rate rather than retail though (maybe like an academic pricing annuity or something).

Other Policies

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll also find a policy that says you can't install Linux on your desktop either.

Re:Other Policies

[plantman-the-womb-st]

Actually no, you won't. I visited the local chamber of commerce recently to renew my license tabs and happened to notice something odd about the screen on the desk behind the counter. It was running the Gnome desktop, default Ubuntu themed. I asked them about it and they said their office switched in early 2006 to all Ubuntu desktops. They are a branch office of the WDOT by the way. Apparently the database that Washington state uses is PostgreSQL too.

Who'd a thunk?

Re:Other Policies

[lgarner]

Your local chamber of commerce is a lot different than a major US agency like DOT, DOE, etc. Most large organizations, including government, restrict what users can install in order to minimize support requirements.

Re:Other Policies

[Phillup]

Your local chamber of commerce is a lot different than a major US agency like DOT, DOE, etc. Most large organizations, including government, restrict what users can install in order to minimize support requirements. Maybe that is why they installed Linux... it is a great way to keep people from installing the game they bought at Office Depot.

Re:Other Policies

[plaxion]

oops!

--
Here's proof that /. isn't biased:

The /. captcha to make this post was "monopoly", but no matter how many times I typed "microsoft" or "micro$oft" it wouldn't accept it.

Watch out!

[Ryan274]

Here come the lobbyists. Who knows, maybe in Canada they can even manage to implement a Vista Tax on computer equipment, you know - to make up for all the lost revinue because of people using vista without paying for it (equivilant to the 15cent tax on all blank cd's that RIAA's lobbyists had imposed a few years ago)

Re:Watch out!

[Gryffydd]

Not "all" blank CDs, just those marketed as "Music CDs"

Re:Watch out!

[bryxal]

..... maybe you might want to google search atleast and get your facts straight. the only way to get out of it is if your blind or have another disability.

Re:Watch out!

[Gryffydd]

Oh, you mean like this?: "17 USC 1008 bars copyright infringement action and 17 USC 1003 provides for a royalty of 3% of the initial transfer price. The royalty rate in Section 1004 was established by the Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1998. This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs" Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy# United_States And: "(4)(A) A "digital audio recording medium" is any material object in a form commonly distributed for use by individuals, that is primarily marketed or most commonly used by consumers for the purpose of making digital audio copied recordings by use of a digital audio recording device. (B) Such term does not include any material object - (i) that embodies a sound recording at the time it is first distributed by the importer or manufacturer; or (ii) that is primarily marketed and most commonly used by consumers either for the purpose of making copies of motion pictures or other audiovisual works or for the purpose of making copies of nonmusical literary works, including computer programs or data bases." Source: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap10.html

Re:Watch out!

[bryxal]

that refers to the united states.... hence the United states anchor in the link.... he parent refered to Canada

Re:Watch out!

[Gryffydd]

He said "maybe in Canada they can [...] (equivilant to the 15cent tax on all blank cd's that RIAA's lobbyists had imposed a few years ago)"
*RIAA* hence United States. He did mention Canada, but in the context of taxes on recorded media, he was referring to the US, unless by "RIAA" he didn't mean RIAA.

Re:Watch out!

[bryxal]

fair enough, your point makes sense and i do believe he didn't mean the RIAA but its canadian counterpart that are jsut grouped together

Re:Watch out!

[triso]

Here come the lobbyists.

Who knows, maybe in Canada they can even manage to implement a Vista Tax on computer equipment, you know - to make up for all the lost revinue because of people using vista without paying for it (equivilant to the 15cent tax on all blank cd's that RIAA's lobbyists had imposed a few years ago) It's a levy, not a tax. Actually, due to that levy, file sharing was ruled legal a while back. No idea if it still is.

Good policy

[bugnuts]

If you allow people to randomly upgrade their departments without considering the interactivity implications, you could inadvertently cause a major problem in a large government organization.

IMHO, it's a sound decision, and isn't a slap to microsoft at all. Everyone has to evaluate their own situation and upgrade if they feel it benefits them. Hell, having a win98 box (non-networked) and running a robot safely for the past 8 years is certainly safer than upgrading it. TFA was clearly biased, and made some idiotic remarks like "ZOMG, if the government doesn't buy vista, MS will go broke!" as if the millions of XP licenses are suddenly free.

So, hold all the "haha" tags, because a thorough evaluation of major upgrades on critical infrastructure makes some sense.

Re:Good policy

[toyotabedzrock]

I don't think it is sounds to not upgrade to IE7. I wanna know that at the very least they are using a browser more secure than IE6. And yes i know IE7 is no firefox or Opera but its better than nothing. It's not as if they have to pay for IE7. It also occurs to me this decision was made not by an IT person but someone who just happens to be in charge and most likely to old to accept change.

Re:Good policy

[Chosen Reject]

I think the real issue people need to be looking at is not whether something is compatible, but why it isn't. Here's an idea, never tie your data to an application where it's at all possible. And if it is tied, but doesn't have to be, then change it right away. Also, if you're writing web apps, write according to standards, and if the browsers don't handle it, tell the browser makers to work on it. MS can get away with doing what they do because people will bow to them. If web developers stopped making hacks for IE and made it clear to their users on their web pages that the website doesn't work on IE because MS doesn't know what they're doing, then have a link to download a browser that works then MS would change their browser fast. But no, developers just bow down and take it, making their life ever harder. This isn't just aimed at MS, it's also for Mozilla and Opera and whoever else makes browsers.

People are locked into MS because they were stupid and shortsighted. Application Developers who write their software for an operating system can learn a lesson too. The data your app uses should be independent of the OS. That way if people want your software on Linux or Mac or *BSD or Solaris or Minix or whatever else they want, they can pay you to do that. Then people can have a choice for what they want to have as their OS. In fact, then the OS itself becomes what the OS should have always been, simply a layer between apps and the hardware and some other basic APIs.

avoid early adoption in production systems

[davidwr]

In general, businesses shouldn't be "early adopters" of any technology unless there's a compelling business reason. Any "early adoption" should be in testbed or non-critical environments.

I wish I could say "never upgrade without a compelling reason" but time marches on and lack of new software and the approaching end of vendor support can be very good reasons to stop using a product.

With that in mind, don't even consider using a Windows-based system unless it's been around 6 months UNLESS there is a very good reason, and strongly consider moving away from it at least 6 months before end-of-life.

Machines which are in special-purpose environments, such as machines which are not connected to any network, or which are adequately firewalled and whose connections with non-firewalled machines are heavily restricted, can continue to be used after end-of-life, but even these should be migrated to a vendor-supported environment or at least one where you have source code so you can fix problems yourself.

Re:avoid early adoption in production systems

[allscan]

Speaking of which, one of the main web applications I work on, for the US Gov't might I add, is still using Coldfusion 5. Talk about behind the times. We are only now upgrading to MX7.

Re:avoid early adoption in production systems

[TubeSteak]

In general, businesses shouldn't be "early adopters" of any technology unless there's a compelling business reason. Any "early adoption" should be in testbed or non-critical environments.

Your advice directly contradicts MS's Vista release strategy.

If you recall, MS released Vista to businesses 3 months before the full commercial release. The goal was to get businesses to do a final beta test and even then, MS knew they still had big problems that needed to be addressed in SP1.

Not to mention that MS was actively using big companies to beta test Vista in late 2005.

LOL

[Colin Smith]

This'll last about 9 months.

Every time MS come out with a new version of Office or Windows, the CIOs throw wobblies sending out warnings that no-one is to upgrade and they're going to stick with the existing version. They really should know better, all it takes is one person, usually somewhere near the top to install the new version, particularly of Office and the whole organisation then has to upgrade. Way to engineer that network effect.

Re:LOL

[Alchemar]

You forgot a few steps...

Anyone's system breaks beyond economical repair. Must buy a new system. New system comes with Vista installed. Boss gets new system, subordinate gets bosses old system, because IT guy works for boss. Now boss sends out letter or email that has M$ new "enhanced" format of HTML or doc, and everyone has to upgrade.

Re:LOL

[smash]

You forgot that all new PC deployments come via the IT dept. New vista machines get re-build with XP before the end user receives it. Vista PCs do not get added to AD domain.

Or at least, that's the way it works here...

Re:LOL

[asylumx]

You must not have any sales reps... They buy their own equipment generally.

Re:LOL

[ChunderDownunder]

It depends. One 1000+ employee company I worked at supplied desktops for the chained-to-the-desk drones (myself included) and ThinkPads for others. They would buy the same model in bulk so as to only have to support one or two disk images.

The sales reps ran the same disk image as everyone else in the company.

Every version of software had to be tested thoroughly before deployment. They switched from NT4 to XP only for USB peripheral support and that newer revisions of laptops did have some problems under NT4.

Getting new software installed was a pain as it required updating the disk image. You want Java 1.4 installed on these machines? They already have 1.2! Fill in a form.

Someone else mentioned the possibility of upgrading, for security purposes, from Win98 and MS Office to that same version of Office under ubuntu & wine. Problem is most of the sysadmins and support personnel would only know Windows and Novell networks - let alone the users.

Re:LOL

[smash]

People can't do that here unless they use their own cash. And in that case, it's still not going on the domain.

All PC/technology purchases need to come by the IT dept - finance has been instructed not to approve anything unless this is the case.

If someone is dumb enough to attempt to flaunt the rules, buy a vista machine with their credit card, and then ask us to add it to our network and try get reimbursed, then sucks to be them - it isn't going to happen.

1. because we don't support it, and 2. because licenses, compatibility, etc with software deployed via script/group policy/SMS, etc has not been taken into account unless the PC is purchased via us. They're free to run whatever they like at home, but on our network, they play by our rules.

Re:Microsoft software is rarely an upgrade

[aldousd666]

Well it's an slow starter out of the gate. I haven't seen anyone say that it's a failure other than die hard linux folks. BUT most of what I do read is that you should not run out and buy it and DON'T upgrade an XP installation, but wait till you get it pre-installed on your next computer, because dealing with the hardware necessary, and lack of drivers etc, is more than your joe user wants to handle. I have one machine with vista on it, and it is clearly marked as working with vista, and sometimes the 'working' part isn't so clear... So, like I said, in 2 years we won't be talking about the failure of vista, but we might be talking about how it's finally getting to be the starndard. Remember XPSP2? everyone was saying for months that they were 'never going to sp2 because it broke too many things! and it made the sky start to fall if you sneezed or unplugged your computer during installation.' Ok, so I made that last bit up.

I feel sorry for the guy who made this decision.

[sehlat]

Since he's clearly bent on saving taxpayer dollars by not climbing on the MSFT "rising license costs" escalator, the words he's going to be hearing soon are:

"Have you ever thought about what you'll do after government service?"

non-story

[aapold]

This is a non-story. It is perfectly normal for any organization to not adopt a new OS for a significant amount of time after it is released, years, even. There are enough things to harp on Vista without making things up and pretending they have significance...

Re:non-story

[Penguinshit]

pssst: "Among the options the Transportation Department is weighing as a possible alternative or complement to Windows Vista are Novell's Suse Linux and, for a limited group of users, Apple's Macintosh hardware and software, he says."

Re:non-story

[john_chr]

And anyway - why should MS worry? Our organisation will buy new PC's with the Vista flavour of MS-TAX but our IT department will downgrade it to the Standard Operating Environment ("SOE") ghost image with XP and the other "standard" corporate applications. MS still gets paid - for Vista - and we end up with XP.

Like I said - why should MS worry?

Re:non-story

[aapold]

Who is making things up? A government organization flatly states that there are no compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista and that there are reasons not to. This is bad for Microsoft. It's news.

I work for a government organization that waited two years before windows XP was considered worth upgrading to. And even then it was mostly just allow it on new machines, don't upgrade old machines. And fwiw, even on this day we still have machines running NT4 out there.

This is not unusual

[StewedSquirrel]

It is very ordinary for a company (or government agency) to adopt a "wait and see" attitude toward new software. Most companies I've worked for will not install a new OS, new software, new firmware, new drivers or whatever until they've gone through at least one revision.

Recently because of Microsofts crappy handling of IE7 upgrades (flagging them as "critical updates"), we had a number of remote users on IE7 and our SSL VPN appliances simply would not work. I had to call a moritorium on upgrading to IE7 and deployed the Microsoft "prevent IE7 update" patch in order to stop these critical updates.

Then, I had to use early-release code for our Juniper VPN concentrator, which broke about half a dozen other things.... Finally, after a few weeks, new a firmware revision for the Juniper VPN came out which enabled me to get the box back to a stable state AND allow IE7 to be used.

But if we had simply called a "ban" on IE7 upgrades in the first place, it would have saved me a lot of headache and our company a lot of productivity.

This is not a "Microsoft sux" decision, but merely a business-case against early-release software that they would likely take whether it was Microsoft or Juniper or Cisco or Oracle or whatever...

Now, Microsoft's handling of the IE7 "critical update" bullcrap.... that falls clearly in the arena of "Microsoft sux".

Stew

Re:This is not unusual

[syntaxeater]

Maybe they should reevaluate their "wait and see" stance? Perhaps while they wait, they can spend some time testing with the assessment tools provided (ahref=http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsv ista/aa905078.aspx/rel=url2html-28637http://techne t.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905078.aspx/> )? Maybe set up a virtual environment with a couple of the different RCs to see how they work out (IE7 and Vista RC1 were both released 8/06)? If there's one thing we need to give Microsoft credit for, it was preparing us and informing us about the changes. Most everything was public and everyone could plan in some way or another regardless of company size. It was never a secret that IE7 and Vista (along with the various technologies behind them) were meant to "revolutionize" their flagship products (not debating that it actually does). Some people didn't. The DOT was one of them. Personally, since this is a government organization and therefore; publicly funded with tax dollars... I would like to see the paperwork - timeframes and tests - that Daniel and the people he's responsible for had done to come to this conclusion. This day and age; it's simply too easy to substitute incompetence with scapegoats...

Re:This is not unusual

[nine-times]

It is very ordinary for a company (or government agency) to adopt a "wait and see" attitude toward new software. Most companies I've worked for will not install a new OS, new software, new firmware, new drivers or whatever until they've gone through at least one revision.

It is ordinary for a company to put off upgrading on products until the impact can be assessed, yes. However, the company I worked for a few years ago, slow moving as it was, was falling all over themselves to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, and also from MacOS 9 to OSX. These upgrades offered tangible benefits to users and to the IT staff. I'm not saying they rolled out updates on day 1, but they had already formulated an update plan shortly after release. "We'll update when X happens." Even some subsequent updates to OSX were planned, even rushed, because of perceived benefits with a low risk of problems.

However, migration from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, and now XP to Vista, are very slow moving. There's no real benefit. For most business purposes, Vista provides nothing anyone needs that Windows 2000 doesn't already have.

Re:This is not unusual

[ender81b]

This is why using WSUS / SMS is a good idea. Save you 10x the headaches. Microsoft flags all sorts of crap as critical updates they shouldn't.

Re:This is not unusual

[StewedSquirrel]

WSUS is great, and I'm definatley aware of how it works, but 90% of my users use laptops from public wireless APs or via cell phone wireless "broadband".

Neither of which is conducive to forcing updates from a central server.

Stew

Re:This is not unusual

[StewedSquirrel]

The 5.3.8 and newer revisions supported IE7, but none of them until 5.3.10 supported "Intel Macs". Both of which are new releases that came out AFTER IE7 was released.

The day IE7 came out, no revisions that worked properly with IE7 were available. 5.4R1 came out shortly later but was very buggy (WSAM barely worked). Then a few months later, 5.3R9 came out that did have IE7 support also.

We are currently running 5.3R10 as it is the most reliable version that has all of the support we need. 5.4R2.1 is out, but still has some niggling issues we weren't happy with.

Keep in mind we have some *very* complicated rulesets for different business areas, different levels of access and different resources.

Stew

Re:This is not unusual

[StewedSquirrel]

There was nothing in the article to suggest that they did not test it.

It merely came to the conclusion that there were more problems (internal apps that don't work, etc) than solutions (uhhh? fancy shiny toolbars?)

Stew

Re:This is not unusual

[ender81b]

Yeah, and SMS (even with the new advanced client) still sucks up bandwidth like no other despite BITS. OH well :)

What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[jeevesbond]

I can think of one very big reason to upgrade to IE7 (unless Opera/Firefox is an option) and that's better web standards support. The web development community is going to drop support for IE6 very quickly (I give it approx. 6 months) because the standards support is so bad.

IE7 has a long way to go with this, but it's a massive improvement over 6. It's not as if it costs any money, aside from bandwidth, to download it.

Obviously I would advise them to just use Opera or Firefox and switch to Linux while they're at it. But if that isn't an option they should at least take the free IE upgrade. The decision to not upgrade Office is a sound one though.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[geekoid]

too new, too risky.
No large agency should be running ie7 for at least 18 months.

At that point evaluate it again.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[jZnat]

Completely agreed. Nobody has an excuse not to have at least IE7 if not another web browser installed (e.g. Firefox, Opera) for normal web usage.

It'd make more sense to have IE6 for your intranet applications that require it along with Firefox or Opera (or anything other than IE really) for normal web usage than to stick with IE6 outright. IE doesn't seem like it was designed for the internet; it was designed for the intranet, and IE7 finally adds on sandboxing that makes it quite a bit more apt for internet usage, but it still has a way to go.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[Dracos]

Someone drank the IE7 kool-aid.

IE7's improved standard support is minimal. See for yourself at webdevout.net. IE7 still sucks golf balls through garden hose compared to all other modern browsers when it comes to standards support. IE5/6/7 now deserve all the ire and hated that developers held for Netscape 4 whe IE4 was new.

If the developer community drops IE6, it should drop it in favor of a browser with more than a 56% aggregated compliance percentage. A 2% improvement is not what I would call massive. Gecko (Firefox, et al), Opera, and KHTML/Webkit all enjoy at least 90% compliance.

IE is today's legacy browser, even version 5.7^H^H^H7.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[_Sprocket_]

The problem I'm seeing first hand is the number of intranet applications that are, in effect, IE6 applications. These applications break in various ways with IE7. Of course, most of what I've seen working well with any other modern browser works well with IE7. Microsoft and those who followed them are now finding themselves in a hole dug with their own two hands.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[mini me]

Luckily the web standards are designed to degrade gracefully. If IE6 doesn't display the site exactly the same as Firefox, who cares? Especially, in this case, if you aren't making a cent from the DOT.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[Xibby]

One of the main reasons is web applications that have been developed for IE6 don't work in IE7 because IE7 is better at standards compliance. So many hacks were made to get things to work in IE6 that many applications that were developed during IE6's reign refuse to work in anything but IE6.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[CastrTroy]

Although as a web developer, I would love to just drop IE6, I think that a lot of businesses can't let it go by the wayside. There's a lot of people still using IE6, either because they don't want to upgrade, or can't upgrade (running win98/NT4/2000). There's a lot of companies that don't want to upgrade because they think it will break their apps that depend on ActiveX. 90% of the time, when I'm looking for a bug in a specific browser, it's with IE. I could save a lot of time if I just ignored problems in IE, but that would cut out a lot of people who visit sites I develop for.

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[smash]

I can think of one very big reason to upgrade to IE7 (unless Opera/Firefox is an option) and that's better web standards support. The web development community is going to drop support for IE6 very quickly (I give it approx. 6 months) because the standards support is so bad.

Whilst that's all well and good - the majority of these are office machines, where really the only website the user should be visiting is the corporate intranet. Which is no doubt written for IE6.

Given this situation, as the article states - no compelling reason to upgrade. Given that the IE7 interface is completely different, plenty of compelling reasons NOT to upgrade.

Semi-on-topic-bitch - microsoft finally fixed printing web pages to (possibly an A4 specific bug, i'm not in the US) in IE7. Since IE v2 or earlier, trying to print a website has resulted in chopping off the right 15% of it. Fixing that major showstopper only took what... 11-12 years?

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[intangible]

1. Install Firefox
2. Install IETab and set it up to have all intranet sites to use IE Engine
3. ...?
4. Profit!

Re:What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

One of the main reasons is web applications that have been developed for IE6 don't work in IE7 because IE7 is better at standards compliance. So many hacks were made to get things to work in IE6 that many applications that were developed during IE6's reign refuse to work in anything but IE6.

My experience is somewhat different. I help develop a couple of really expensive devices with Web interfaces. When IE7 came out, I took a look to see how bad it would be and, unsurprisingly IE7 broke a lot of things. So here's what's interesting. We test in Firefox, and unofficially support Safari, Opera, and whatever else. They all work just fine sans the occasional rare bug because they all adhere reasonably well to standards. IE7 and IE6 are both in the same category for us, they break standards so badly they each have to be a special case. Maybe IE7 is twice as compliant as IE6, but given how bad IE6 was, that really doesn't matter that much. They are both so broken they cannot be expected to work, unlike every other browser made by anyone but MS.

Why not change the site to Slash-Microsoft?

[LibertineR]

What is happening to this forum? Keywords = "ha ha"?

WTF?

Thousands of companies have banned upgrades when new products come out that might break internal apps or include the need (and expense) of training users.

Why is this news?

When I see the headline: "NSA embrases Active X as a security standard, THEN it might have some news value. All these Bash-Microsoft threads only serve to remove cred from this forum, unless they contain some REAL NEWS or INFORMATION.

Bitches!

Re:Why not change the site to Slash-Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this news?

They make this into news because it gets all the moron script kiddies laughing, thinking that another "victory" has been struck against microsoft. Anyone who's ever worked in a large shop knows that this is standard business practice. Microsoft knows how the system works too. Bill Gates is not sitting with his head in his hands asking "God, why not!?!?!". All the amateurs like to think he is but we know the truth.

It's easy to sort the n00bs from those who've been around the block a couple of times when you read some of these bash articles. Anyone in the know could have told you that this would have been the case long before Vista was ever released.

Oh well, 14 year olds with your unread copies of 2600 in your backpack... have a blast. No one else is moved by this announcement.

Re:Why not change the site to Slash-Microsoft?

[dedazo]

Here's how it works. Slashdot owes its continued existence to Microsoft. Without Microsoft, Slashdot would be another obscure blog. But over the years the people who run Slashdot have figured out what brings the big bucks in ad revenue: Microsoft bashing.

Now, everybody loves to bash Microsoft. It's the "in" thing to do. Never mind that half that bashing is hyperbolic FUD that the rest of the world (you know, normal people) look at and go "huh?" But Slashdot has turned that into a smooth-running cash flow.

Just go back through their "search" function and find all the Microsoft stories. I'd be comfortable saying that probably 3/5ths of them are either worded in a way that fans the flames, are stupid exagerations, have disingenuous titles that end with a strategic question mark (much like all those Fox News "stories" on neocon pet hate topics) or are just plain FUD. The key here is that most people who read Slashdot never actually read the comments, where occasionally you'll see someone saying that the article in question is stupidity encarnate. No, a million eyeballs already saw the "Bill Gates Kills Kittens?" headline and added it to their "let me tell you why M$ sux" repertoire.

In many ways Slashdot's "coverage" of Microsoft is a bit like Al-Jazeera's "coverage" of the United States and Israel. They also have a captive audience that want and need the targets of their hatred to be evil, so they believe everything the "news" tells them. Except that Slashdot is even better, because the "editors" can simply shrug and say "hey, we just post stuff that other people submit". They've driven off most of the intelligent people who used to discuss interesting things related to free software and technology and now simply feed the vicious (but profitable) circle that exists between them and the "OMFG M$ SUXX LINUX ROXXORZ LOLOL" crowd.

The overwhelming irony of Slashdot is that it is owned by a commercial concern that competes with Microsoft in many ways, has proven itself untrustworthy by closing off the source code for their flagship product and actively promotes products that "simplify" offsourcing. Talk about pet topics? Every time Slashdot posts a story about how evil Microsoft is, about how great open source is (or how terrible it is for open source to be attacked or subverted) or about how damaging offsourcing is, they are in direct contradiction to the corporation that owns them, or are effectively promoting them.

BTW, I'm not claiming no one should criticize Microsoft, or that they are above any such criticism. They do a lot of stupid and wrong things, chief among them being annoyingly toxic to their own customers (in my opinion). There's a difference though between informing your constituence of facts and strategically picking the most inflammatory submissions that cover every story about MS to whip them up into a frenzy in the name of ad impressions - never mind padding them with infantile "editorial" comments.

And don't even get me started on the pseudoscience crap. But there goes my karma anyway.

Re:Why not change the site to Slash-Microsoft?

[jZnat]

And do you really think any Slashdotters actually click the ads? Nobody sells ads based on views; they're based on clicks at least. If we come here to flame each other about Microsoft, we surely aren't clicking the ads for Vista and other shit that's advertised here.

Re:Why not change the site to Slash-Microsoft?

[LibertineR]

Excellent point. Thank you.

Routine..

[joshetc]

I work for DHS and we just migrated to XP / Office 2003. It is routine for government agencies (just about all major computer systems really) to wait a LONG time before upgrading.. Everyone already knew people wouldn't mass-migrate to Vista until at least SP1 was out...

Re:Routine..

[wolfdvh]

I work for another large US federal department and we were only mandated to switch to XP a few months ago. They traditionally withhold our site license disks nationally to keep people from putting a new OS on the network until it has gotten some scrutiny at the national level. The consensus of our local betting pool is we won't see MS Vista until 2009.

Re:Routine..

[mapexvenus]

Same situation here. I work for a division of a Fortune 500 that uses Microsoft products heavily. However, we take our time and for several very good reasons none of which I need to list here given the knowledgeable audience that visits this forum. Just to give you an idea of where we are at, we're finally beginning to 'think' about making the move to MS Office 2003. Going back to the article in question, the IT head of the DOT hasn't banned the organization from upgrading to Vista or Office in the future. All he wants is enough due diligence to be done - something that any IT head would (should?) do.

am i the only one who initially thought...

[brunascle]

why does the department of transportation have the authority to tell me what software i can and cant run?

Re:am i the only one who initially thought...

[PhilipMckrack]

It's part of the Patriot Act, didn't you read it all?

Re:am i the only one who initially thought...

[Frumious Wombat]

Because you can watch your data flowing down the Intertubes, which makes it transportation related.

Rear View Mirror Warning

[Stanistani]

*Warning*

Operating systems may appear more compatible then they are...

Re:Rear View Mirror Warning

[D'Sphitz]

it would make more sense if you said something like

"Operating systems in the mirror are less compatible than they appear"

Re:Rear View Mirror Warning

[Stanistani]

Yours is better than mine.

Can't edit posts, unfortunately.

It'll just have to sit there and rot in its poor grammar for all eternity.

It's not about the features sometimes

[connorbd]

I've heard of people saying "But I don't want version 5! I want you guys to make version 3 work the way it's supposed to!"

I really think a lot of nontechnical users couldn't care less about new features or redesigned interfaces -- what they've got works, and they don't want it messed with. So every time a software company adds a bunch of features or redesigns the interface, there's a good number of the user base that is going to be seriously ticked off because they have to retrain on all the new stuff.

Microsoft is one company that doesn't even come close to getting that. I've seen some of their smart house ideas for example -- their designs solve problems that people don't have to begin with. (Is anyone really in such a state that having the fridge track the RFID chips in your food packaging will improve things? Well, handicapped people and shut-ins, maybe, but for the vast majority of people it's overkill at best.)

Re:It's not about the features sometimes

[PhilipMckrack]

(Is anyone really in such a state that having the fridge track the RFID chips in your food packaging will improve things? Well, handicapped people and shut-ins, maybe, but for the vast majority of people it's overkill at best.)

Right now? Absolutely not, but your kid's kids will probably press a 'restock' button on their fridge and have an order sent to them and not have to waste an hour or two of their lives every week in a grocery store buying the same milk, eggs, and bread they bought last week. This is one step closer to that. Lots of tech out there now are just baby steps to a greater goal.

Re:It's not about the features sometimes

[jeevesbond]

I really think a lot of nontechnical users couldn't care less about new features or redesigned interfaces -- what they've got works, and they don't want it messed with.

Problem is that Microsoft wants to be all things to all people. They think all those people who've switched to Firefox will switch back by giving them a spangly new interface (and throw standards advocates a bone too). They panic about it, get all worried that losing IE usage share means losing their monopoly, the result is IE7.

Their plan is:

1. Make early adopters switch back to IE by giving them a spangly interface and 'tabs'
2. Force everyone else to upgrade, they're too stupid to have a choice anyway
3. ...
4. Profit!

What they should do is provide a small, very quick, ultra-standards compliant browser everyone can use. Average people will just use what they're given, they don't need anything more. Whilst people who want tabs, extensions, skinning and all that jazz can use Firefox, Opera, Konqueror etc. Microsoft would gain much more credibility by rewriting the browser engine, rather than shoehorning a few fixes into a product that is fundamentally flawed.

That won't happen though, because this is Microsoft. Nothing less than 100% usage share for IE is good enough in their eyes, and that is their biggest mistake.

Re:It's not about the features sometimes

[drinkypoo]

I've heard of people saying "But I don't want version 5! I want you guys to make version 3 work the way it's supposed to!"

The problem comes with Version 3 has not been end-of-life'd but fixes are not being backported to version 3 because they want you to buy version 5.

"Support" doesn't mean very much... And known bugs will often be marked won't_fix (or local equivalent) in still-ostensibly-supported versions in order to compel you to pay for the upgrade. Microsoft has been known to do it pretty regularly. Apple too, of course.

Hooray for Free Software.

Reason 1 ... we don't support this product now

[guysmilee]

Reason 1 ... we don't support this product now

Re:Reason 1 ... we don't support this product now

[JustNiz]

so?
If it already does what you need it to do, why worry about support?

Re:Reason 1 ... we don't support this product now

[xj]

You want support so that when the next big security flaw is found they fix it for you, because windows is not open source you can not fix it yourself.

Re:Reason 1 ... we don't support this product now

[JustNiz]

Its not an issue if you don't give it internet access.

Except the dead ones

[Mateo_LeFou]

...they just write letters.

Re:Except the dead ones

[asylumx]

...and vote...

Every time someone posts a 'Vista sucks' story...

[DarkAudit]

God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.

Banned is too strong a word

[wsanders]

"Banned" is too strong a term. It's an engineering decision.

Just say "Upgrading to Vista is about as appropriate as upgrading to a steam-powered ornithopter."

Re:Why not IE7?

[diskis]

Greetings from technical support.

Customer: "I cannot access internet/my bank/whatever"
Me: "Did you install IE7 recently?"
"Yup"
"Okay, use system restore. Here's a complimentary link to firefox."

They do not call again.

Dawinism... applied

[Seismologist]

The Microsoft upgrade virus model explained:

1. Come out with new OS and release into the market environment.
2. Stop upgrading older OS versions and tell vendors they won't have drivers etc. approved.
3. Current OS gains foothold on market at a virulent rate, quashing older instances of the competition (the older OS version) and tout this slow but eventually exponential customer adoption a success.
4. Evolve OS into the next version and release into the same environment and repeat steps 2 & 3.
5. Market evolves sufficient antibodies to combat next version of the virulent OS and becomes more resistant to infection.
6. Current virus goes into lingering but still persists on weak hosts and certain vendor vectors.
7. Current virus reaches a marginal but stable equilibrium with its natural environment.

My, oh my...

[Eric Damron]

"As the article says,'In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products."

Daniel, Daniel, Daniel... You know your Boss's, Boss's, Boss is about to get "THE CALL" don't you?

Re:My, oh my...

[guruevi]

You know, it's still a government agency! They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the ravenous chair-throwing Ballmer of Redmond without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, lost, found, queried, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighter.

Another Fortune 500 Company

[smellsofbikes]

and our IT guy says "Vista adoption by the company is a minimum of two years out."

Microsoft's standing on upgrading to Vista?

[LoudMusic]

Microsoft employs thousands of people as well - I wonder what their standing is on upgrading to Vista and associated products. Sure they get the software for free and the hardware for cheap, but it's still thousands of computers I bet they're replacing too.

And what's happening to all of these displaced PCs? Someone should build a cluster!

Re:Microsoft's standing on upgrading to Vista?

[tritab]

Interesting point. A better question might be what Microsoft's schedule is for upgrading their own workforce to Vista. Would any inside employees like to fill us in on the dirt?

Ban? Hmmm....

[ksalter]

From the article:

Schmidt says the Transportation Department hasn't ruled out upgrading its computers to Windows Vista if all of its concerns about the new operating system -- the business version of which was launched late last year -- can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues."

emphasis added

Funny how the positives from the articles aren't mentioned.

I also like the use of the word "ban", which doesn't appear anywhere in the memo. No negative implications with that word.

If you are going to bash someone, at least be a bit more subtle.

Nothing new here

[ADRA]

Realistically, any decent sized organization will have the exact same policy written or not. The one thing that makes them special is that people found out about it. Give a few years, they'll have a migration strategy laid out and away they go.

Hopefully, that migration strategy won't be to Vista. One can dream...

Re:Nothing new here

[JustinianV]

I interned with the Michigan DOT for two summers, they only just upgraded from NT 4.0 (circa 1996?) to Win XP (circa 2001) in 2005 and I don't think they finished until 2006. Some of the design machines were already running XP as needed, but the number of in-house software packages for data management (property info, job info, accident info, financial info) is tremendous in government, so upgrading programs to deal with the new OS takes time. It was at MDOT that I first learned that a computer is only a good tool if it can help do more work faster and a new OS is only worthwhile if it can make things faster/cheaper/better. Given a few years, I doubt MDOT will have even considered upgrading to Vista for anything but design machines and only if Benteley locks them into having to use Vista for Microstation. I would love to see the department go open source for OS, but I think that is always contingent on the software they need being available for that operating system.

Re:Yes it is

[Divebus]

1968: "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"
1996: "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"
2007: "you're both fired!"

Typo

[Aaren]

Please remove the extra DOT from the title. That would really make my day.

That leaves DOT with other option.

[bakeman]

Buy Windows XP and other Microsoft supported products. I don't see this as such a huge problem for Microsoft. At least DOT is investigating the possibility of using Vista in the enterprise. I'm guessing not so much for .
Give it 2 years and 2 service packs, and try again.

Re:Microsoft software is rarely an upgrade

[bobcat7677]

Vista is a FAILURE! There, you have at least one person telling you its a failure that isn't a die hard Linux person. I cut my teeth on microsoft stuff and work for a Microsoft partner shop. I don't even run a Linux box anymore (though I did try it for a while). The few people I have heard from that said Vista is great were almost certainly paid by Microsoft to "voice their opinion" on the subject.

What's the big deal?

[My Iron Lung]

I work for Environment Canada and our IT department is in no particular rush to let anyone use Vista yet either. Simply put, it's a brand new OS that may require training for employees, requires a whole lot of new policy to be created in Ottawa, requires a whole lot of software testing to make sure our government specific software doesn't break.. sure there's been a lot of time to test it, but the fact of the matter is, noone needs it just yet and it'd require a heck of a lot of hardware upgrading anyways. It took them a year just go rollout Service Pack 2 for XP to everyone. We've only just upgraded to Office 2003. And noone is allowed to have IE7 installed yet either.. or Firefox for that matter. That one I can't really justify. :)

No Office?

[L4m3rthanyou]

Vista I can understand, and IE7, I can understand... but Office? Why?

Granted it's a big expense, but Office 2007 is actually pretty nice... I can't ever remember having people tell me "Dude! the new Office is awesome!" for any previous version of MS Office. It's actually very much improved.

For all their faults, Microsoft can at least do three things right: Office, Visual Studio, and DirectX.

Re:No Office?

[iggymanz]

people by and large have been writing, spreadsheeting, and making tedious powerpoint presentations with older versions of office just fine and dandy. Since 99.5% of what needs to be done can be done without spending more money, why bother to upgrade?

Re:No Office?

[Jason Earl]

Actually the new version of Office, with its new default file formats, is probably the most problematic bit. An organization the size of the DOT almost certainly has nearly a decade of investment in the old MS Office binary formats. Office 2007 is going to cause real pain to a lot of organizations.

Re:No Office?

[Todd Knarr]

Compatibility. DoT has thousands of people using the old versions of Office, and for them handling the new file formats is going to be a major headache. DoT does not want to deal with that time- and money-sink. So given the choice between massive headaches for thousands of people or declining to update a few dozen, which is the easier option to take?

Re:No Office?

[argent]

Office 2007 is actually pretty nice...

But is it pretty necessary?

Re:Why not IE7?

[RevWhite]

Working for a Fortune 500 company with lots of web-based apps, I can tell you that it breaks almost all of our web-based applications. Certainly our developers should not have relied on IE5/6 so much, but they did.

Re:Microsoft software is rarely an upgrade

[aldousd666]

Hah, ok. I still am not convinced it's a failure, just a bumpy road. I wouldn't be very upset if it does turn out to be a failure, but there is this sneaky little lock in device called an enterprise agreement people have with microsoft, and then also bulk busniess contracts with dell etc, and one way or another those products will end up in all of those shops eventually. I hope it does fail, serves them right for not coming out with a new product for over 6 years, but I just don't think it ultimately will.

Re:I feel sorry for the guy who made this decision

[iminplaya]

He sure won't be working for Microsoft(Apple, on the other hand...he helps one cartel by hurting the other), unlike most people is this position who end up in fat, cushy jobs with the companies they used to regulate, like the FCC and FDA guys do.

Not a Fortune 500 Company

[Ngarrang]

Vista will never be installed at my company. We rarely buy NEW computers, preferring the cost benefit of eBay. My company moves slowly. I am just now expunging Win98 from the network. Why? Because it worked. We are still running the same office version as of 5 years ago. Why? Because it still works. Seriously, our employees gain ZERO benefit from a new OS since they would still be doing the same tasks (ie, word and excel, access db, Citrix to ERP package).

The only reason we are upgrading everyone to XP is for anti-virus and anti-spyware purposes. Our chosen product is eliminating support for Win98 and Win2k. All of our other software, though, still works just fine. Microsoft may not like it, but ph00ey on them.

Re:Not a Fortune 500 Company

[PitaBred]

If you're already running stuff that old... why not try out Ubuntu with Wine for Office? No need to pay for upgraded hardware, no need to antivirus software, and it'll almost certainly run Office 2000 without a hiccup.

Re:Not a Fortune 500 Company

[Phillup]

Dude... I so want to work there!

Re:I dunno.

[Kaki Nix Sain]

I'm sure there's a cure for penicillin in there somewhere...

Is it similar to the medicine to treat aspirin?

Re:Vista the new Me.

[Evilest Doer]

Windows Me, meet Windows Vista.

Only now, instead of throwing something together to meet an arbitrary deadline (year 2000), they have spent years of dedicated, careful effort to make something that completely sucks!

Free frogurt

[Uncle Rummy]

That's good!

Re:Yes it is

[Maxo-Texas]

I'd get a boner if someone would offer me 19 years of job security.

Most of my friends seem to work for places like this.

---

Well folks, it's a great product but the sales are not there and the investors are pulling our funds.
You can use your office the next couple weeks to try to find a new position.

---
They seem okay with it- but it would drive me bloody insane.

Re:Why not IE7?

[Hennell]

Just because something is free doesn't mean it doesn't cost anything. Best case scenario you have to pay your IT guys to install, configure and help users not used to it.

If the company uses software/internal programs dependent on IE you then you'd need to really test it to check nothing goes wrong. That would take many man hours, and could never guarantee a trouble free life. If you have everything set up fine now, with no advantages in changing why change?

Plus you have to remember that IE6 may be poor security for the home user, but within a professorial environment using mostly internal websites and a proper firewall, virus and so forth there's less of a need to update.

(Course places developing internet based things might have more of a problem.)

Lies and FUD!!!

[eno2001]

I get sick of hearing all the lies and FUD that the anti-Windows crowd spreads all over the place. Microsoft , is the unsung hero of the computer world and internet commerce. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have the booming businesses bringing millions of dollars into the hands of simple and plain people like you and me all around the world. Microsoft beyond bringing startling innovation and major progress to the computer world has also indirectly created an infinite number of business and wealth creation opportunities with every PC out there whether in business or at home on your desk. That alone is the MOST compelling reason. By preventing the distribution of Microsoft's latest and greatest to the largest possible number of PCs, these sorts of actions are essentially trying to prevent the lubrication of the orifices of commerce. I plea with you to please reconsider your actions.

Respectfully,
Davis Hawke

Re:Lies and FUD!!!

[MLease]

Hmmm.... I suppose bending over WOULD feel better with some lube.

-Mike

Re:Lies and FUD!!!

[smash]

If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have the booming businesses bringing millions of dollars into the hands of simple and plain people like you and me all around the world

*cough*

Yeah right. The only thing we wouldn't have, is point and drool system administrators - and I'm pretty sure that's a *good* thing.

Improve security - buy alternatives

[user_ecs]

Stop feeding the monopoly. A competive environment is good for all users. A monoculture is bad for security

SUSE preloaded
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7778908329.html

eComStation preloaded
http://www.curtissystemssoftware.com/preloads.htm

Re:Improve security - buy alternatives

[Quantam]

...you do realize that the entire reason they're doing this is to KEEP a monoculture, right? Because a monoculture is easy to admin. Having 15 different OS, while likely good from a security standpoint, is never going to be a viable option for any business (or government). Just look at Linux - its extreme diversity and customizability has always been its greatest strength and greatest weakness; I can almost guarantee you that the only way Linux will ever have a hope of stealing the crown from Windows will be to have a single distribution so consolidate market share that it's a monoculture of its own.

Re:Improve security - buy alternatives

[Creepy Crawler]

Stupid spammer.

NOBODY is going to buy your eCrapStation. Not here, not now, not ever. Anybody who does is a retard who deserves to lose their money.

Instead, please go to the Dell innovation website and go try to sell your garbage-soft there. Perhaps we'll see another story about a eCrapStation loser that is also silenced.

Hint: SPAMMERS SUCK.

Don't worry, he's being fair.

[twitter]

I wish they would at least move to IE7 if they are not going to move to Firefox/Mozilla. To stay with IE6 is just unfair.

From the fine article:

Among the options the Transportation Department is weighing as a possible alternative or complement to Windows Vista are Novell's Suse Linux and, for a limited group of users, Apple's Macintosh hardware and software, he says.

With an open mind like that, I'd be surprised if they were not running some kind of Netscape browser already. Give him some time and he's discover Firefox, Debian, Open Office and all sorts of great stuff.

Mod a coward up!

[Ken_g6]

Somebody, please, mod one of these Anonymous Cowards up, before we get three posts saying:

"there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for downgrading to any Microsoft software products."

Oops - too late!

ooooh...

[stubear]

...CIO does is job, film at eleven. Despite all these childish articles and misdirected anger towards Microsoft and Windows, Vista, IE7 and Office 2007 will all sell well, become the de facto standard desktop OS for hundreds of millions users worldwide. Simply amazing given the security issues, near infinite combination of hardware configurations Windows works on, and articles like this. For those who haven't yet figured it out, Microsoft and Windows are here for the long haul.

Re:ooooh...

[Quzak]

Yup and the M$ bashers /. are too.

Re:ooooh...

[timerider]

I bought a new HP laptop today. It came with vista home premium preinstalled.
I poked around in vista for maybe three quartes of one hour.

Now the laptop's running xp pro and suse 10.2.

'nuff said.

Re:ooooh...

[stubear]

Ummm...anecdote is not the plural of data. Besides I don't really care if you uninstalled Vista. I only care what happens within the confines of my home network. I have trwo Vista Ultimate machines; one an older P4 that is going to be a web/file server and media center PC, with my XBOX 360 running as an extender to my HDTV, and my new Dell XPS M2010 which came with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. I happen to like a lot of what Vista offersw in the way of bettwr file searching and vastly improved netowrking. I use Aero but I don't go all gaga over it. It's pleasing to look at, especially compared to Vista Basic and the crippled classic UI. Now if Adobe woudl just hurry up and release the Creative and Production suites I can quit having see those stupid UAC dialogs.

Re:ooooh...

[Creepy Crawler]

---Ummm...anecdote is not the plural of data.

Then what are case studies? Why are they accepted? Or, when does anecdote turn into a statistically significant function?

---Besides I don't really care if you uninstalled Vista. I only care what happens within the confines of my home network.

If you don't care, why are you responding?

---I have trwo Vista Ultimate machines; one an older P4 that is going to be a web/file server and media center PC, with my XBOX 360 running as an extender to my HDTV, and my new Dell XPS M2010 which came with Vista Ultimate pre-installed.

Someone's been smoking the MS crackpipe. Unless you can't set up a file server with Samba using SWAT, why not delegate the serving duties to something more robust? Debian Stable handles that quite effectively. Even one of the stylish Linux kits (Ubuntu or Fedora) would work well here. Do you need a pretty GUI and demand to have a monitor dedicated to that machine?

---I happen to like a lot of what Vista offersw in the way of bettwr file searching and vastly improved netowrking.

What do you mean "better file searching"? If you are meaning that Indexing daemon or Find Fast... well.. I don't know what to say. Still, I've not found much quicker than

find $directory | grep $filename

Also, if you arrange your Samba server properly, you can segregate different types of media via different shares (and stored in different directories). Once this is done, you can push the media via different transport protocols.

Also, I severely argue that Windows Vista is NOT better in networking. Even compared to previous counterparts, the networking system is unstable and refuses to work properly with published standards. Witness the switch to NTLMv2 and how nearly every SAN now either needs an upgrade or to delevel to NTLMv1 on the Vista box. Also, MS praised the 'innovative' IP stack switch from BSD to an unstable untested stack. That is not an ugrade in any opinion.

Also, my Linux machine can communicate with nearly every protocol ever made and supports nearly every network device. Network devices that do not have native drivers can use NDISwrapper. My machines, with the proper Wireless chipset and driver can become a full access point. Can Windows do that?

---I use Aero but I don't go all gaga over it.

We also have OpenGL accelerated desktops that will work with many more graphics cards than Windows will accept. It is also possible to prune the system to very basic, but very usable desktops that allow you to get work done. Vista pretties are more of an annoyance, and will probably cost a nice sum of money for the proper tools to turn off the bloat. Then again, you will pay computationally for the DRM built in to your system. I can, at any time, build in DRM-like controls but under my complete control.

---It's pleasing to look at, especially compared to Vista Basic and the crippled classic UI. Now if Adobe woudl just hurry up and release the Creative and Production suites I can quit having see those stupid UAC dialogs.

I have something similar to a "UAC" dialog. It's called sudo. It doesnt co-opt my screen, nor does it steal focus from anything. It also logs all usage in a log file so you can determine possible command errors. Mine was designed for that purpose and works well.

Re:ooooh...

[timerider]

... i was about to say the same things...

BINGO

[hurfy]

"The only reason we are upgrading everyone to XP is for anti-virus and anti-spyware purposes."

And they only reason i am buying new hardware is to run the anti-virus, etc :( All the programs are quite happy on a P3-450 but the security prgrams aren't and choke it to death. Since many of the machines are still Win98 at least no one is asking about Vista ;)

Clearly..

[Hercules Peanut]

...some government employee didn't get their kickback in a timely manner. I'm sure this will be resolved suddenly and to M$ benefit.

preproduction systems are fine

[davidwr]

I think it's great to have long beta periods and early GM release to businesses, so they can use them in their testbed and other non-critical environments.

Using them in production environments before you know the bugs aren't going to cost you too much isn't good business. As for waiting 6 months: Let Microsoft's other customers find the bugs your internal testbeds don't find.

The old "web standards" argument

[mccrew]

I can think of one very big reason to upgrade to IE7 (unless Opera/Firefox is an option) and that's better web standards support. Hate to break it to you, but with 90% or more of the market, whatever IE does is the standard. I'm not saying that's good, but it is what it is. The only web developers who are going to drop support for IE6 are those who don't have paying customers.

Re:Yes it is

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd get a boner if someone would offer me 19 years of job security.

With math skills like that, please don't hold your breath! ;)

Good...

[Prototerm]

I'm allergic to kittens

Re:Good...

[temcat]

Yeah, but God kills these, too.

Re:Why not IE7?

[StewedSquirrel]

I can list the Enterprise applications that do not work, in any capacity, under IE7.

They work under IE6, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror, but not under IE7.

Juniper SA is one example. Some older versions of PeopleSoft act kind of funky. Some of the online CRM stuff doesn't behave properly.... there are others... not to mention all the internal software.

Blah.

Also, don't discount the fact that the average business-cost of a man-hour of employee time is about $30/hr and assuming a liberal 1 hour to coordinate with the user, access their machine and do a complete install and config (including staff overhead), the cost of deploying it to 60,000 users is a hair under $2 million in IT costs and $2 million in productivity loss during the upgrade process.

And then the question is "why did we just spend $4 million"? What did it get us?

Stew

Re:Yes it is

[hublan]

What do you mean? Sounds like he's got a fine career as a high-flying CFO ahead of him.

Standard procedure: wait for SP2

[njdj]

I've never heard of any really big organization installing any new Microsoft OS before Service Pack 2 comes out.

SP1 usually fixes most of the really bad bugs, then SP2 fixes the bugs introduced by SP1. That's how it's been for about the last 12 years.

Ok; You got it.

[WindBourne]

Both McDonalds and the military are hiring. Keep your hands, nose and guns clean, and you will be able to work for 19 years.

Reply to sig

[Descalzo]

That is so true!

Not just wait-and-see

[phorm]

It's also common for a company to take a "do-not-use" approach to software (or hardware for that matter) that causes known conflicts. Where I work, we have a policy of reverting machines that come with IE7 back to IE6, and disabling the windows-update packages for IE7.

Why, because we know that it bugs out with our portal system, as well as some of our other information management systems. I know that many other industries and/or sectors are experiencing the same thing: it's not a case of "might not work" or even consistency, it's pretty clear that anyone using IE7 will run into issues with the systems we commonly use.

For that matter Java 6 (from 1.5 to 6, WTF?) doesn't play nicely with various systems either, so that's on the do-not-use/do-not-upgrade list as well. The fun comes when all the happy little auto-updater applications decide to take it upon themselves and increment versions without our knowledge... which means making sure that auto-upgrades are in general disabled when possible.

So far I've found that firefox 2.x is working happily, which is one of the few newer web-type apps that hasn't run into conflicts when moving up from older versions. It seems that one end or the other runs into standards compliance issues in most cases (i.e. older web-app that doesn't meet standards, newer browser/java/whatever or vise-versa).

Service Pack 1

[infonote]

IMHO commercial enterprises should only upgrade to vista after service pack 1.

Our stuff is IE7 friendly because of Firefox

[Kris_J]

It appears that, where I work, the web stuff we developed is happy to run under IE7 because I pushed to have it work under both Firefox and IE without doing browser detection. This limited all the browser-specific fancy crap and has meant that our "Portal" happily works with pretty much any browser.

I wish more places did the same thing. Very little of the DHTML/Javascript bleeding-edge UI stuff is really necessary. Frankly, I think it's cooler if something works on Opera for the Nintendo DS.

Mirrors

[neonfrog]

You know, you can usually eliminate the blind spot just by adjusting your stock mirrors correctly. Most people set them so they can see the "fins" of their car. That CREATES a blind spot.

Try this (recommended by the AAA by the way - an 'old' link):

* On the driver's side, put your head against the window, THEN adjust so you can see the "fins."

* On the passenger side, put your head in the middle of the car, then adjust the mirror.

Those are approximations, of course. Tweak until you have continuous coverage from Side Mirror--> Rear View --> Side Mirror. In my car (smallish hybrid SUV with requisite blind pillar spots) I don't have to turn my head all the way because my stock mirrors eliminate the blind spot completely! I look anyway, of course, but it's nice to have TWO views that overlap. I see the headlights of a car passing me in my side mirror while I can still see their taillights in my rear view. It took a while to get used to, having done the "fins" approach for decades, but now when I drive someone else's car I feel vulnerable until I get the mirrors properly aligned.

Re:Mirrors

[UnknownSoldier]

> you can usually eliminate the blind spot just by adjusting your stock mirrors correctly

Agreed. I tried this a few years back just to see if it would work. It took a little bit of getting used to, but it was great being able to see cars adjacent to you without having to turn your head.By the time they were "off" the mirror, the front of their vehicle was directly across from your door.

I used this tactic to adjust my mirrors. (You need 2 lanes for this.)

- Track a car behind you in your rear view mirror.
- If he's passing you on your right, you should be able to track him as he goes "off" the rear-view, and is "on" the left mirror. If you're adjust your right mirror, slow a little, so that they eventually pass you (technically this is illegal, but its only for a short time, and you're only doing it intentionally once to adjust your mirrors. Of course on the freeway this is easy to do ;-)
- They should always visible in at least 1 mirror, sometimes two.
- As the front of their vehicle approaches your door, you should still be able to see a sliver of them.
- When he finally falls "off", you should be able to turn your head 90-degrees and you should be looking straight dab at the front of the vehicle.

If he "falls" off your left mirror, push your mirror "out" a few degrees, and try again.

It feels awkward at first (like your driving a big truck), but knowing that you have eliminated 99% of the blind spot is such a nice feeling.

And of course, you should always be shoulder checking when changing lanes.

It's not necessarily a wait and see attitude...

[rehtonAesoohC]

These kinds of decisions have to be approved by a board and then each time it's approved by a committee, the decision moves up a rung to the next level.

It's a lot faster to have a lower body deny the request, and not filter it up to the rest. It takes several months and sometimes even years for major systems-impacting changes to become implemented. Hell, on our contract, we've been trying to get our new CAC authentication approved for the last 6 months, and even though it's been approved by a number of different bodies, we're still awaiting authorization from the CCSB to implement. Until they approve us, we have to keep delaying, keep delaying keep delaying our implementation...

Vista is no different. As long as there's one body that shoots it down, they won't approve the implementation, and with a change that has such a broad scale, all the different factors come into play and can cause major delays. The fact that it takes longer isn't necessarily caused by people waiting to see if Vista is worth it. The government will inevitably upgrade to vista (And IE7 especially), it just has to be approved first.

Re:Microsoft software is rarely an upgrade

[bobcat7677]

I will agree with you that Microsoft has alot of relationships and tricks up their sleeve to force adoption of Vista. But my opinion is that Vista is a failure by being just terribly implimented and enterprise customers should and will revolt agaist this system and find other means of meeting their needs. Windows ME saw widespread use as a result of the Microsoft marketing juggernaught but ultimately never graduated from the status of "dismal failure" and Microsoft had to take NT and make something to smooth things over. I may be wrong, but I think the problems with Vista are more fundamental then mere service packs can remedy. It comes down to some poor design/implimentation decisions that were made (Balmer?) that doomed the OS to mediocrety (at best). Early on, there was talk of Vista (longhorn at the time) being a truely revelutionary OS with a file system based on SQL databases and all sorts of cool stuff. In the end all we got was warmed over current technologies with some flashy front end stuff. And a whole lot of "are you sure" boxes.

the DOT is not alone in this

[ChrisA90278]

Our company has gone further than the DOT. Not only is upgrade not allowed but a PC with Vista is not allowed to connect to the corporate network. Our government customer has banned Vista from it's network too and we need to inter operate. The DOT is not alone. Many organizations are going to wait and do 6 or 12 months of testing first.

Re:the DOT is not alone in this

[Guydj]

I also work for a Township and they have also banned IE 7 and vista Because it was unable to pass our security measures Also the local power op has banned vista and ie7 as well

Re:Vista the new Me.

[Frumious Wombat]

They should probably hand out a copy of Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month" to the entire Vista team (managers down to programmers), and tell them to get back to work and try again. It has that air of OS/360 about it. Maybe they can hand out decks of bronzed punch-cards to the team leaders to congratulate them on their runaway success.

My students are playing with it, and their comment is that it's ok, but on less than brand-new hardware, it doesn't run Aero, so it's basically WindowsXP+, with a few annoying hardware incompatibilities. Thankfully we run on PPC Macs, so it won't be making much of an inroad where I have to deal with it for a while yet.

It's usually because of ActiveX

[zullnero]

These departments usually don't authorize upgrades because they're afraid they would have to hire someone to gut out the ActiveX garbage that they bought off on several years ago and replace it with more securely designed controls.

Re:Yes it is

[Maxo-Texas]

Even I can't see how I got those numbers. Sheesh!

I'd do a lot more than get a boner for 41 years job security at a job where I was deciding what software a company was going to use.

I'll pass on the mcdonalds- I'm not sure my math skills are good enough. The military turned me down- too old (and they keep raising it to just a few years younger than me- I hear some branches are now accepting 40 year olds- I expect when I retire at 55 they'll be allowing 50 year olds to enlist).

Question to ask is:

[crucifixxio]

No matter how much you sit and debate about Vista to be installed or not installed in corporate networks, the leaders in your orgs are going to decide that. Because face it, most of you work for someone who works for someone .... (atleast 4 levels up). So just stay put and get your work done with what you have and stop cribbing. If it is about an issue relating to your home computer, keep yapping...

Orgs banning IE7 because of SAP Portal

[Synic]

SAP Portal software doesn't work with IE7 without using a recent patch and huge orgs can't patch SAP without a shitstorm of trouble, so they just ban IE7 altogether. Oddly enough Firefox works with those versions of SAP Portal (although suffering from some minor rendering bugs causing very wide pages with scrollbars).

You know what's really sad...

[plazman30]

To some extent, Microsoft is trying to do the right thing. Vista's security is way better than XPs security, actually running as a user and prompting for permission to run with admin rights.

And IE7, though not perfect, is much better at rendering standard compliant webpages than IE6 ever was. IE7's method of installing ActiveX controls is way better than that IE6.

And yet vendors continue to write software that forces you to run as an admin, or uses IE6's proprietary rendering. Then Vista and IE7 come along, and everyone screams foul because the stuff they wrote IMPROPERLY IN THE FIRST PLACE won't work on Vista and IE 7.

We can't move to IE 7 at work because over a dozen vendors have web apps that drop unsigned ActiveX controls on the box. We have other vendors that won't sign their Java apps, so the newest version of JVM 1.5 causes us issues.

The biggest holdup for Vista won't be IT budgets, but poorly written apps. It's a good thing Microsoft bought Softricity. They're going to need it.

And for the record, I would use a Mac or Linux any day over Windows. And yes, I have used Vista.

Andy

You can hear chairs being thrown

[sizzzzlerz]

all the way from Seattle!

Re:I feel sorry for the guy who made this decision

[Matt Perry]

the words he's going to be hearing soon are: "Have you ever thought about what you'll do after government service?"

Yeah, he'll be retired and playing with his grandkids, not worried about computers.

Re:Kinda funny..

[petrus4]

No average joe computer user will ever pick linux over windows as long as linux looks like something out of the late 80s.

I have just one acronym for you, my friend...KDE.

Seriously. Go get Kubuntu, and have a look at it. Other Linux DEs might still look like they were ported from the Amiga, but KDE has definitely entered the 21st century.

Try it...you just might like it. ;)

As a webmaster that....

[jkrise]

didn't care for standards compliant bowsers
didn't refrain from using IE-only quirks in the server
didn't find anything wrong in re-coding the server every time a new browser version came out...

It is unfair that you are still a webmaster.

The world needs webmasters who understand their job is to be compliant with the entire web - not just the Microsoft portion of it.

DOT [regarding vista] says "Don't go there."

[j33px0r]

enough said.

Well, duh!

[penguin_dance]

Most companies waited a long time before upgrading to XP if they even did that--I still know some major companies using 2000. But the real question is why does ANYONE need to upgrade? Most offices need office applications, email and a web browser. A few people need other, more specialized programs. But if you've got one of the later versions of Office and Windows XP, WHY should you upgrade? And it's not like your users will appreciate having the latest and greatest--they just got used to the last version and you're going to hear a lot of complaints over items moved or changed. What REALLY is office 2007 going to do--make my coffee? Any new release from MS is going to be full of bugs and security holes--why deal with the hassle?

That's why Microsoft wants to move to a lease-type role model where you rent the software rather than own it--because there's no compelling need to change and eventually they will stop upgrading. Or, worse for MS, they'll move to other applications like Open Office.

Our office is certainly not going to Vista and not even IE7. We use Oracle portal for the web and testing found some issues using IE7 with it. I've also helped a friend with her website and commercial CDs. Security setting are almost backwards. We found IE7 will have some basic securities locked up so tight (like running a CD from the drive) that it's hard to find where to turn them off. More important things, like phishing security that should be left on and probably won't interfere, can easily be turned off by a menu, however.

While I currently have IE7 for testing, I personally use FireFox exclusively for everything else, it has everything I could want and then some.

Re:This might just be a veiled suggestion

[symbolic]

How do we know it's not the DOT IT guy's way of saying, "Hey Bill...my palm is wide open - if you grease it with enough of the green stuff, I might just might be able to find a justification to upgrade after all." Isn't that usually how these Microsoft-related moratoriums work?

Re:Why not IE7?

[dave562]

Also, don't discount the fact that the average business-cost of a man-hour of employee time is about $30/hr and assuming a liberal 1 hour to coordinate with the user, access their machine and do a complete install and config (including staff overhead), the cost of deploying it to 60,000 users is a hair under $2 million in IT costs and $2 million in productivity loss during the upgrade process.

Or in the real world you just push it out via a group policy while the employee isn't there.

Fixed again

[phantomfive]

"there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for downgrading to any Microsoft software products."

(Yes this is a blatent attempt to score karma by bashing MiCro$uX. So sue me if you want but mod me up and Linux is still te RoxXorZ)

Rubbish

[Joce640k]

If you do any kind of backing up in tight spots then you need your mirrors.

I adjust mine so I can just see the door handles.

The DoD is doing this too

[teshuvah]

I work for the DoD, and they have made it very clear - if IE 7.0, Windows Vista, or Office Vista is found on the network, you're in deep shit. But hell, we're still not even allowed to install SP1 for Windows 2003.

This is hardly news

[Lifyre]

I'm a member of the United States Marines and my job is roughly that of an entry level IT professional. We (and by we I mean the Armed Forces) have been operating under a moratorium against upgrading our Microsoft products for years. The only authorized OS we can install, support, or allow access to ANYTHING on our network is Win2k. It's the only OS we're fairly confident has had most if not all of the security holes worked out of it. Of course if there was a security breach we couldn't do anything about it because of NMCI... I love when an Admiral forces a civilian organization down our throats that does the exact same job we do, with less responsiveness, less effectiveness, and a bill in the billion dollars range... And then resigns his commission as an Admiral to become the CEO of NMCI 6 months after he forces the acceptance. They of course can't do our job in the field so they settle for making our job difficult in garrison.

But when did they switch from 2k to XP?

[r_jensen11]

I'm willing to put money down that it wasn't months after XP came out.

Amazing, but welcome.

[ErichTheRed]

I think Microsoft might finally have to realize that a lot of corporate and government customers just aren't going to upgrade every time there's a new version of Windows or Office. I work for a company that just grew insanely huge in the last 7 years. When they were small, they were in XP's rapid adoption program...but now we have almost 8 times the number of users and lots more supported applications.

We're trying to stay off Vista for as long as we can; we have almost 3000 machines that can't run it at all. Office 2007 is going to introduce way too many training headaches. Even though most of our users are savvy enough to pick up the new UI, there are a few who have never updated their skills from Office 95/97. I'd like to move us to IE 7 or Firefox for the better security and the fact that Microsoft is eventually going to pull IE 6 patch support. However, we're married to a ton of ActiveX which makes switching to non-IE browsers impossible. Also, lots of our outsourced app partners don't support IE 7 yet, or require an expensive upgrade to get it.

Microsoft already sees this, which is why they have the Software Assurance licensing model. We can run whatever supported version we want, as long as we pay. I don't think there will be too many iterations left for the monolithic desktop OS and office suite anyway... Eventually the web user interface problem will be solved, and connectivity will be universal. As much as I hate the whole Web 2.0 texting/blogging/YouTube/MySpace stuff [1], that's where the computing sector is headed. Pretty soon everyone will be using their cellphones to write spreadsheets.

[1] I don't really "hate" Web 2.0...I just don't like the fact that it's reduced people's attention spans even further...

Re:Microsoft software is rarely an upgrade

[aldousd666]

The compelling and forthcoming reason will be that they will end-of-life XP and 2003 with a year or two. If the employees who are still hooked on office and visual studio want to be able to continue to function, they will be forced to upgrade. Also, those bulk discounts they get on Dell and HP computers will be bundling in vista, and the cost of 'downgrading' each installation will eventually become a factor for those who want to stay with XP. It'll be slow, but it'll happen. I personally think that linux, open office, and various other development platforms apart visual studio would more than suffice the needs of the masses, but they aren't inclined to think so, because for one, they dont' already use them, and they are already cheaper etc. The only way that vista will lose out in the end is if the adoption of the linux (superior, granted) systems is more universal. This includes your parents, and grandparents dialing up from their vacation homes, as well as educational institutions whose 'computer skills' classes are focused entirely on office. The puzzling fact that Macs are on every media display of computers versus the overwhelming the lack of mac adoption serves as an example of the power of the status quo marketing agreements to influence the way people buy computing software, namely their operating systems.

Older versions

[StewedSquirrel]

Newer versions do, indeed, work.

This was not the case when IE7 first came out.

5.3R10 and 5.4R2.1 both seem to be reasonably stable versions that support IE7.

When IE7 came out, I believe 5.3R7 was the newest and SAM simply refused to run under IE7 at that point.

Stew

Re:Kinda funny..

[asylumx]

Ok, I think I've got a box sitting around at home that could handle it. What are the steps to getting this up and running?

Re:Kinda funny..

[petrus4]

Ok, I think I've got a box sitting around at home that could handle it. What are the steps to getting this up and running?

Go here and download the Kubuntu ISO/cd image, and burn that to a CD...you can do that with Nero or something similar in Windows if your computer has a CD recorder, as most do these days.

Once you've done that...if you're putting it on another, lower end machine which doesn't have anything else on its' hard drive that you want...simply put the CD in its' drive and reboot the machine. It should boot up into the LiveCD...and when it does that, there should also be a shortcut on the desktop that comes up to run an installer program which can format the hard drive and install the contents of the Live CD onto the hard drive. Once that is done, simply take the CD out of the drive and reboot the computer again, and it should be installed.

Re:Kinda funny..

[asylumx]

So, once I do that, all of my hardware will just work?

Re:Kinda funny..

[petrus4]

So, once I do that, all of my hardware will just work?

For the most part, yes. Printer support is a bit weak, and you might also have some trouble with winmodems...and if you have something truly weird and exotic, then you might possibly have to scratch around a bit. There's a very large number of sound cards that work though...a ton of hard drive controllers and hard drives, and I also haven't come across a CD-ROM drive in a long time that wasn't supported by Linux. USB is supported, and I'm constantly surprised by the amount of USB hardware that I hear about Ubuntu supporting, which you'd expect to be Windows only.

Try installing it...if you have more than two pieces of hardware at the most that aren't supported, I'll be very surprised.