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

[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

[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

[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

[thewils]

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

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

[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.

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.

What's that noise?

[HangingChad]

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

Fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

[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?

[Shadow Wrought]

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

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!

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

[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)?

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*

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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...

Rear View Mirror Warning

[Stanistani]

*Warning*

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

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.)

Except the dead ones

[Mateo_LeFou]

...they just write letters.

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.

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!"