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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."'"
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.
"there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to any Microsoft software products."
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?
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
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?
My work here is dung.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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?"
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.)
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.