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Texas Senate Proposes a Budget With a No-Vista-Upgrades Rider
CWmike writes "The Texas state Senate yesterday gave preliminary approval to a state budget that includes a provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Windows Vista without written consent of the legislature. Sen. Juan Hinojosa, vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because 'of the many reports of problems with Vista ... We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide,' Hinojosa said during a Senate session debating the rider (starting at 4:42 of this RealMedia video stream). 'And the XP operating system is working very well.' A Microsoft spokeswoman said in response, 'We're surprised that the Texas Senate Finance Committee adopted a rider which, in effect, singles out a specific corporation and product for unequal treatment. We hope as the budget continues to go through the process, this language will be removed.'"
Plus, there's a potentially harmful network effect. A particular department might need new pcs, and upgrade to Vista with no particular cost or problem... but then, they're on a network with, swapping documents with, and have different support and training requirements than other XP users. All of a sudden, other XP users might feel a need to upgrade, generating unnecessary expense.
Even more importantly, do not EVER let anybody in your company or government upgrade to a newer version of Office, because the moment that lid is opened, there's no going back.
There is no IT dept for the entire State of Texas. So, first of all, your analogy is flawed.
Secondly, the legislature writes the budget for the state's OS upgrades. It is certainly within their purview to forbid an especially worthless OS on a cost/benefit basis, regardless of technical considerations.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I would wager that a significant portion of them are still running Windows XP (if not OS X) and have little or no experience with Vista aside from what their son's best friend's cousin's neighbor told them.
Let me help. I work for a global IT firm with more than 30,000 employees. We sell a lot of Microsoft kit. And internally we have chosen to skip Vista because it's proven to be too bloody problematic in several rather extensive pilot studies.
Apologies for posting AC here, this is one post I really would not be able to get away with.