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Ask Slashdot: Why Won't Companies Upgrade Old Software?
An anonymous reader writes "IE6. Several governments and big companies I know use software dependent on IE6. They won't upgrade, citing the expensive cost. Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded! You see, before computers, companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff. It wasn't until the computer came that they could fire all those people and save a ton of money on their collective salaries. Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved? Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards. However, big organizations keep citing million-dollar upgrade costs as why they won't do it. Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
But,OTOH, let's put it off until next quarter and let them worry about it.
"Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?" Yes. But that's long-term, in the long-term it's someone else's problem. In the short-term they need to cut costs to make the stock look good.
What happened to that money they saved?
Globalization. Billionaire CEOs. Over 10 million on "disability" sucking at the government teat.
That's my guess.
Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded!
Oh ok, Im glad you cleared that up. Say, can you write a proposal for how this will save oodles of money upgrading IE8 on 10000 machines to IE10, even tho it will brake the internal apps of about 15 different departments? Maybe you can also write 15 separate proposals for them to renew their contracts with the people who originally wrote the apps, and proposals for the cases where the original dev is long gone and we'll need to do a full replacement.
Boy, Im glad you cleared all that up.
It went into executive compensation, where else?
the answer is: because it is the big white elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
I've heard both. Too expensive to explore new technologies, or too new and intimidating for current staff.
When companies talk about multi-million dollar costs, it's because they've got a number of systems tied together with data feeds, batch processing, and other interactions between their systems. You can't typically upgrade one piece of the pie without upgrading the whole pie.
Regardless of how much of the pie gets upgraded, all the interaction points have to be regression tested, and sometimes recoded or reworked to work with the new software.
That's not an excuse for failing to continually invest in those upgrades, but many companies have put it off for so long that they're now facing an insurmountably complex (and thereby expensive) task.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved? Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Yeah, or you could use it to hire a second pool-boy, no?
Now my question: What does upgrading IE have to do with enhancing shareholder value this quarter?
There is no kinder way to put it that drives the meaning home. The executive level - especially in large corporation type environments - have only one thing pressuring their job performance: meeting/beating budgets. Not division excellence. Not Technological prowess. Only x amount of $$$ = meeting forecast targets = $$BONUS$$ cha-ching!! Personally I think this executive cultural behavior stems from the short term thinking of our entire "free" market system in play these days. No company hardly cares beyond 2-3 quarters out. They struggle badly to plan long term financially, because in the stock market/share holder culture most executives live in, meeting the next quarter's profit goals is the end all be all of their work life.
The problem is giving the folks that hold the money a *reason* to upgrade. See, you can explain to a tech guy about all of the holes and bugs and he can agree that an update to ________ would be fucking awesome!
But the folks holding the cash hear about all of the same bugs and holes and they nod and they think, "The software we've got has been getting the job done. Also, I remember the last time we replaced the software it was three months of people learning, and technological failures, and people making mistakes before any real work got done, and another six months after that before people started feeling comfortable with it. It was two full years before I stopped hearing them bitch about it." and all of those rational, reasoned arguments go straight out the window.
Now, that's just one reason - I have personally been witness to quite a few companies using software that has never been upgraded before. Any comparable software is vastly out of reach to a small business, so it's a big deal to have to spend $3-4k on six licenses when he needs 12. So you end up with someone that would absolutely LOVE to upgrade from IE6, but unfortunately, the server software is still only available for Windows NT, and can't be migrated for a variety of different reasons - I could go on.
But I won't.
At least for the DoD, AHLTA was one of these cases - the US DoD system for medical care. Used IE6 for years after IE7 was released. It was ridiculous. And now that Windows 7 is installed on all the computers, they still refuse upgrades to IE9 or even 10, or better yet a reliable platform from Google or Mozilla.
It's because the process to change things takes so long. The money is negligible and the software change get's considered a "major upgrade" making it "critical" but to get everything approved and disseminated through the entire network of bases, forts, camps, etc. takes the amount of time you're looking at.
Why should they upgrade their software if it's working? You have the idea that old software is outdated in inneficient, which is a wild assumption to make. Suppose for a moment that you own a business, and actually use a piece of software for something. This software is working now, has been working for years, and in your eyes will continue to work becuase the requirements are never going to change. Should they upgrade their software, just, because? I wouldn't blame someone for running software 50 years old if it works for what they need, is stable, and lets them do their real job.
if it aint broke dont fix it. ....sorry its just a joke.
and with how crap is costed and costs why keep paying and paying and paying and paying
Wall Street. Large companies only care about the next quarter, because that's what shareholders care about and what executive bonuses are based upon. Much easier to kick the can down the road, put off upgrades until tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes.
If your idea of a company running outdated software is IE6, let me say this: welcome to the industry! You're obviously new here.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Suppose your spouse or family member pointed out that a professional remodel would really make your kitchen and bathroom both more attractive and more pleasant to use, with more storage space, etc. Think of reasons why you might put off the decision to send out for professional bids. Then add a bunch of zeroes and a whole lot of affected customers and employees, and that's what organizations are facing.
Changing the OS on 100 machines is a task that a group of professionals can do relatively quickly.
Changing the OS that 100 users use on a daily basis, without getting 100 angry phone calls (per day), is much more difficult.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
In theory, the savings went to the shareholders as profits the first year they fired those people. After that, it wasn't in the budget and wasn't a savings any more (in the most BASIC form of accounting).
It's very, very hard to justify spending money on something that will take a decade to pay for itself. There is almost always something else you can spend it on that will have a better return. And the computer systems are largely "soft" dollars -- ask yourself "what check did I not have to write" -- so unless you can cut some more people, it probably won't be approved.
Think about having to buy a copy of Windows for each workstation and a copy of Windows server for the servers and then getting all new devices which are compatible and etc.. etc.. etc.. Upgrading from closed, non free software to closed non free software is massively expensive in both dollar value and in human resource cost. When you crunch the numbers, upgrading hardly makes sense.
This is why a lot of public institutions are going with free software and open source. The savings alone from moving to Microsoft Office to Libre Office is substantial. If you add in the cost that can be saved moving from Windows desktop to Linux desktops and Windows server to Linux you can quickly see the appeal. The problem with this kind of move is that most computer users don't want to learn a new system and most IT staff don't understand the non windows based solution well enough to support them.
So instead of spending millions and millions on upgrade costs or moving to a new platform that will cause havoc, most companies will just stay locked into old outdated software.
They are afraid of change. It is natural for those who do not understand new approaches to fear change. They will in fact actively oppose it and try to make the transition as hard as possible.
... That went to corporate profits and executive bonuses!
Didn't you notice? Workers are more effective than years ago, yet are paid significantly less and less. Why? Profits for investors are more important than wages.
Why are employees lower and lower paid, and thus lower and lower educated, and lower and lower caring about what they do, and thus relatively stupid regarding the products they sell (Home Depot, Best Buy, etc)??? Profits!
You don't go to a corporate business and expect caring and experienced people. You expect people that aren't paid enough to care with the education and demeanor of high school dropouts.
In order to upgrade the systems they also have to upgrade the back end applications that were hard coded to require IE6. These applications were often merely the front ends to legacy financial, database, purchasing, ERP and so on. You have to upgrade all of the middleware systems as well as the back end systems fed by the middle ware systems. IE 6 often required custom hacks in order to get it to work at all, and once you got it working it was your head if you messed with it.
You also had things like right management through Internet Explorer for Windows based systems that only worked in version 6. In short you could easily spend millions of dollars upgrading back end systems in order to get them to work with something newer than Internet Explorer 6. The larger the enterprise / agency the more systems that were dependent on it that very version and the worse the problem was.
All of which discounts traditional migration costs of migrating computers, licenses, testing software, hardware, implementing a hardware independent image, creating packages, testing with new versions, testing new versions with old versions etc, etc, etc. For most IT departments a migration is the largest project that they will do every few years. The consultants that work migration and that know what their doing are few and far between. You could probably fit every single qualified consultant from every agency in the country in a single conference room with room to spare. Needless to say you can generally count on paying over $10,000 a week per consultant to get someone that knows what their doing.
Migrations are very complex work that involve a lot of details, project management, hardware expertise, vendor relationships, management consultation, software license issues, SQL database work, OS work, infrastructure work and so on. Point being it's a bit more involved than rolling out the newest version of Internet Explorer from the Microsoft update site and you sound like you desperately need a consulting company before you cost your company far more money than you would pay in their fees.
It went to lower prices to remain competitive with everyone else that also adopted computers to lower their costs.
Err, government doesn't give a shit about efficiency. That's not the point of government.
It's part of a wider attitude to technology. The problem is that the costs of sticking to the old technology (missed opportunities, inefficient developers etc) are hidden inside the day to day running of projects, whereas the cost of upgrading is painfully visible.
I once worked in one of those IE6 organisations, and their projects were around 3x slower than they needed to be, but they didn't know it, so they kept on with the old technology. (they were still actively developing COBOL, so really ie6 was the least of their woes).
What's the benefit to upgrading your web browser before the current one isn't supported?
Sure, you'll have to do it eventually, so why not do it now? Simple - time value of money. Suppose it costs $100k to upgrade your browser now, and $100k to upgrade it a year from now. If you spend the money now you get a fancy new web browser, and you don't make a dime more in revenue as a result. If you spend the money a year from now you can invest the money for a year at 6% interest and end up with $6k more than you would have otherwise had a year from now after you spend the $100k. If you wait 6 years to upgrade then you have an extra $20k, and if you missed two upgrade opportunities along the way then you have $200k more on top of that because you make one investment instead of three.
How do you make 6% these days? Well, for starters by not taking out more debt - if you're in debt then pay down that debt, and that is probably the better part of 6% with a 100% guarantee depending on your creditworthiness. If not that, then invest in the business - chances are your company gets more than a 6% return on capital if it is doing well - that $100k could let you expand your business elsewhere.
Bottom line is that browser upgrades and such are a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
Now, if that old browser is holding you back from deploying some new software that will greatly enable your business, then upgrade that thing tomorrow, and borrow money if you don't have the cash to do it! This isn't about having a newer browser - it is about making a profit.
As far as where all the money you save/make goes - it goes to the company owner/shareholders, or gets invested into other areas of the business. When you finish paying off your car do you take the extra $400/month and tell the guy who mows your lawn to drop by every day to trim it, because after all the lawn is a little higher each day and you have the money to do something about it? Do you start getting your car waxed twice a week? No, you do whatever the heck it is that you enjoy doing with your money, because it is your money, and it really isn't anybody else's business what you do with it once you've paid your taxes.
Like everything in life, age is not a reason to get rid of something.
Companies that are using backend software that lacks support for modern clients can very well be an expensive thing to upgrade. If it's developed in-house, the people who wrote it are sometimes not even around anymore, or have moved into other positions, etc. If it was contracted out, the company may be out of business or simply can't upgrade the system on the cheap, due to having to basically start over from scratch. If it's packaged 3rd party industry software, like e-billing or medical records stuff, which can run anywhere from ten to several thousand dollars in upgrade and licensing costs, management will generally take the opinion of "if it still works, we're not upgrading it."
In the end, I think it truly does come down to cost. Paying for in-house staff to design a system doesn't make much sense these days, even when the alternative is to deal with predatory licensing contracts. Companies tend to buy into something once, and use it until it's cheaper to upgrade than to fix or recover from a failure. And really, I can't blame them, because corporate software isn't cheap, isn't noticed unless it fails, and usually works just fine.
Basically, it's the same reasons why homeowners don't generally replace water heaters or washer and dryers unless they fail, even if a newer model has more features or saves on electricity or whatever.
"Cost" isn't just buy new hardware, or upgrade software.. there's also risk involved in change. Any risk creates *potential* massive loss, in several ways.
Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?
It depends on the company. Some companies saved money some didn't and the savings many times is capitalized over years. In other words, they are probably still paying for those old systems - even if it was financed with cash, they still need to use the system long enough to actually save. Think buying an expensive but very fuel efficient car - the savings come from owning the car for its life - not the first year you bought it. Although ....
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
There isn't always savings. many times you need a system just to stay competitive or to just stay in business these days.
However, big organizations keep citing million-dollar upgrade costs as why they won't do it. Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
No, they are not losing money. The days of upgrading and getting substantial cost improvements or productivity improvements are long gone.
IE6? Now that I don't get. I have never - ever - heard anyone cite costs as a reason not to upgrade from IE6.
IT isn't a profit center. The money wasn't "saved" by upgrading systems, rather, it wasn't spent. IT department budget was probably reduced to reflect this.
These loopholes are used to siphon budget into their own pockets - so of course they won't upgrade, they'd lose out on 50% of their annual theft.
Many times there isn't a real reason to upgrade, the computers are of a good enough quality to do the job and that is all that matters.
Another problem is that huge amounts of business specific software would need to be rewritten for the new machines. An expense way higher then just a computer upgrade.
What needs to happen is for MS to create a 100% backwardly compatible browser. Good luck on having that happen.
Some people look at things quarter-by-quarter. These types will NEVER see the benefits of any long term projects.
I worked at a company that had a compile process that would take a half an hour to complete. We were running on ancient computers.
So, I made a spreadsheet. I showed the cost of a new computer. And through a study on my home computer, determined that it would cut compile times in half since my home computer wasn't bunk. Then used my salary as an average engineering rate for time. Showed that you compiled 4 times a day (typical) you would save X dollars per week, and the computers would pay for themselves in however many days. Then all the engineering time saved would be pure profit. Multiply that across an engineering team of a few dozen people and it would be like getting a new employee for free, in terms of hours saved.
It was a great idea.
It was completely ignored.
It is painful to work for people with such a total lack of vision. Not only was it painful to work on these slow (but hey! they're already paid for!) computers, but it was painful knowing that a good idea wasn't worth having there. And that not a single bean counter could see the logic in my proposal.
My point is, companies often times see things by quarters. Expense, money in, bottom line. Anything - even something simple and efficient - falls outside those parameters. You might as well be yodeling in Swahili.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Maybe is related with the language theirs managers use. If you see the future you/company/whatever hacked as another company, not the current one where you would be wasting time and money now, because your language just shows them as different things, and just push those pesky tasks to the other company, the future one, that anyway will be the one hacked, not the actual one.
Is not trivial to escape from the trap we build around ourselves with our language.
It's like this soulskill:
If you make less money (less because you make less sales on your software), then they will have more money relative to you.
Think of it like this: If I have 10 smarties, and you have 5 I have double your smarties. My buddy also has 10 smarties and he's in my club. We're more powerful than you , relatively.
Now, if I buy your product I have to give you one of my smarties so I can take smarties away from my buddy, Then he'd have,say 8 smarties, I'd have 12 smarties, and you'd have say, 7 smarties, that would upset my club.
I'm sorry soulskill, I can't let you do that. Welcome to the future.
No stupid php generated ajax would ever give the raw power of our well tunned C++ data crunching and visualization fat clients
No dotNet or Java mostruosity in our mixed aged hardware server room, will ever outperform our well tunned corba procesing daemons
So far in every hardware upgrade, testing shows: our current systems performarce murders in the same setup, anything new done by the trendy consulting firm in turn
If you have a crappy system to begin with... anything could be more than an upgrade a remediation
If you are a Suit, paying down technical debt probably doesn't seem like a priority. It doesn't translate to bigger executive bonuses or a higher stock price (or winning the next contract), which is the name of the game. Even if a Suit knows that reducing technical debt is the correct thing to do, sticking your neck out for it won't get you a bigger bonus or the title boost. So you end up with enterprises running on hopelessly outdated systems that nobody understands anymore, because doing things like documentation, refactoring, testing, etc. costs money with no immediate or observable ROI.
Then you get stuck in a situation where the outdated, undocumented, and pretty much un-migratable system is essential to the success of the organization. IT or engineering has to jump through arcane hoops against their better judgement to maintain the system or the whole operation will go tits up. The young, wet-behind-the-ears OS X hipster running desktop support can't fathom why they don't just re-write it in grails or snails or banjo or whatever the coolest web-app construction infrastructure du-jour is. The veteran software engineers are much more cynical: the system is so hopelessly spaghettified with a tangled web of "business logic" that a re-write would be damn near impossible.
After a Windows Update cripples the entire operation by subtly and perhaps unintentionally modifying some aspect of IE or Windows that the system depended on, the Suits convene and agree to bring in The Contractors. The Contractors take months longer than their initial estimate but eventually get the thing straightened out by implementing some stupid half-solution: now everyone has a Windows XP VM for accessing the system.
Final cost is an order of magnitude more than what it would have been to let a team maintain it and contain the complexity. The stock price tanks, but the Suits get record bonuses anyway. Hail Capitalism!
The real problem is: these companies let themselves get vendor-locked by Microsoft.
If they had used a browser that was less proprietary, and more standard; there would not be this problem.
Once you go with a company like Microsoft, you get totally locked in.
The summary assumes that "upgrading" is intrinsically and self-evidently beneficial. Why? People in business usually are not teens who get excited by a point release of ubuntu or by the latest irony free announcement of "the most secure ever" version of Windows. While they might be using IE6 they are mostly not relying on Norton Pirate Bay Special Edition for security, or on their annoying college age offspring for opinions on IT infrastructure or purchasing. Why would anyone spend large amounts of money and time to replace hardware and software that works as desired, to retrain emplyees to do stuff they are already doing, and maybe even hire extra employees, when there is no need?
The question only becomes relevant when failure to act has a reasonable potential to lead to financial penalty or some other kind of liability.
The old stuff was written by contractors, or employees who left a long time ago
The original development was expensive, behind schedule and painful
Management is terrified of software development as a result of the experience
It won't be upgraded until it becomes an "extinction level" crisis
I am sure there are plenty of specialized functions that are hard to replace, but many are just applications that "do things the way they have always been done".
Never mind they can can now be outsourced better and cheaper. How many times have you heard of government agencies spending millions on upgrading systems that are essentially CRM systems, or even worse, payroll systems and the like?
I've also seen private companies go through great pains to "upgrade" systems, to replicate arcane "business logic", which could be more easily solved by changing the process to achieve the same results. (One little example - why track 5000 sales districts, sales, etc - to calculate sales commission levels. Just assign territories, count sales, run it thru a function and be done.)
Back to another government example - why is it so important that role be taken every single day, for budgetary re-reimbursement? (sure, keep role to make sure no kids go missing, but what does that have to do with the cost of running a school? The lights are still on, the heat/AC is running and the teacher is there if there are 18 or 32 kids in the class.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Yes, they might be losing money, but you'd have to show them that. There's a tonne of work that'd you'd have to do to show that spending $10 million now will save them $50 million over the next 10 years or so. Then they still have to justify the outlay of $10 million all at once where the $50 million will trickle in and would be barely noticeable amongst the rest of the balance sheet.
That's actually how IBM stayed in business. Make the upgrade seemless and painless. The old software still works fine, new stuff can be included as it goes. The cost of upgrades is included in service contracts.
What it boils down to is that you have to sell the idea to joe investor who wants to make sure his dividend is paid out each quarter and that the value of this stock goes up so his asset sheet says looking good.
Most investors don't give two sh!ts about what the company is actually doing.
...Who refuse to upgrade software configuration tools used to program their hardware?
I work in the fire protection business. Fire alarm panels require special software to configure them for the specific needs of your building. The need to be tweaked periodically as the building is renovated, etc. so its not a one shot deal for the configuration.
Once a panel is released, unless there are glaring functionality problems, the software never gets maintained beyond a v1.0. In a vast number of cases, the custom software is OS dependent. So when the world moves from 98 to xp, xp to 7, etc. it actually breaks the programming software. The vendors take a honey badger approach and refuse to spend money developing new versions to keep up with the new OSes.
The vendor's suggestion? "Sell them a new panel!" Right. So because you are lazy and refuse to maintain your software (or for that matter make it so that its not OS dependent) you expect us to tell the customer "Yes we know the $100,000 solid state system you invested in 7 years ago works flawlessly, but we cant program it properly with our new equipment since we upgraded to the latest version of windows. You need to spend another 100K. We are flatly told "I dont care about your computers, my system works fine. Find a way to program my existing system or I'll find somebody who CAN!"
I have guys who have to lug around up to 3 or 4 laptops of varying age in their trucks because we have 10-20+ year old panels which work great and are mechanically sound, but the software to program it only run in the version of the OS that was current at the time it was released! (we even have a few that are DOS based)
Becurrse it corstsss toou moach monneey, andd it still werrrrks naoww
It's all a matter of perspective: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today. Be glad they're running something written since the advent of the PC.
BTW, I'm an old Unix hacker who has moved on to Linux but the command line still rules.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. "
-Someone who got to keep their job
I have worked in the auto and insurance industries at multi-billion dollar companies that do not understand IT and sometimes the waste is horrific.
When each department can have its own IT people, writing similar software as the IT group in all the other departments, you can tell there is a huge disconnect in understanding how to streamline IT operations.
At my last job, I was told that if I didn't get some new capabilities into our application fast enough (I was given two weeks), the group that was requesting the changes would instead go with their own solution (an expensive IBM solution, costing in the millions, I think). When most companies can't realize that a corporate solution would be a savings on everyone's budget, you can see how they never even get to the 'Should we think about upgrading' question.
I would also say, while IE6 is annoying, the real problems are with more proprietary stuff. If you follow the industry, you can find that in the past year, a bank in England basically shut itself down when attempting a software upgrade and having something go horribly wrong. This is why many banks and insurance companies still need COBOL and FORTRAN programmers, they don't want to start from scratch.
There are a lot of angles, having managers that understand IT, money and also risk.
In the last month there was an article about a company that still uses punchcards. Think of that and be glad of IE6.
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Last November, I made my last $237/month student loan payment. Imagine how much money I could be saving now. In fact, I could've use a small portion of that money to help pay off my credit card.
Guess what I did in November? Bought a new car. $300/month payments.
You know very well where that money went. On other things. On new company cars, and other things. Lined a few pockets and greased a few palms too, I'm sure. Didn't get saved, though.
(For the record, I needed to replace my 96 Olds Ciera...237K was pushing it. Didn't need a car that expensive. Wanted it, though.)
Take a "small" woodworking shop. 20 people, a few trucks, huge cave like building packed with machines on the bad/cheap side of town.
They contract to gov, firms, make a small simple kitchen somedays too. Shelves, desks, seats, computer desks fill the trucks at 6/7/8 am.
The 3d tooling and software allows a team to visit any site and show a 3d vision and in rapid time get the trucks filled.
The software works on XP pro, the machines understand XP and the creative types get upgrades for their software.
Whats going to change with average woodwork? The exotic lamination?
Only constant pressure from other small teams bidding on small gov contracts.
A new school, lab, expansions..all very time and cost sensitive.
So a bright person asks to swap XP to Win 8? Will the 3d software work? Supported like it is with XP? With the 15-10-5 yo machine that worked with XP?
How many days down to test it all? New software needed? One the phone to Germany, Japan or Italy that night?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You're asking the wrong question. The correct question is: Why should they upgrade?
And if your answer doesn't involve making or saving money, you're going to get laughed out of your bosses office.
cuz i'd be out of a job already.
Clearly, you don't understand how business operates.
As a business owner, I run on a software product thats long gone. It's DOS based, and I couldn't run my business without it. I paid over 100k for it back in 1994.
At this point, we run it in a VM, and actually have it available on all of our systems, not just 3 boxes, but until last year, we ran it on a 486/66. When we upgraded other computers, we kept the old computers as spares.
Upgrading to a system that will do the same thing is about $250k. Thats a quarter of our sales this year. If I do that, I may as well turn out the lights and close up. It's not worth 250k to replace a tool that just works with one that is unknown to us.
I am sure you make a great IT guy, but you would do well to get a better understanding of the business realities.
Remember how bad Microsoft Office was when you transitioned to 2007? Everything moved and you couldn't find anything! Now imagine that you are used to doing everything the same way for 12 years now. It's going to take a few weeks to figure out how to do your every day tasks again. A company can train you, costing profit; or they can wait for you to figure it out yourself, costing sales.
Say a company makes 10k a year for each employee, that's 200 dollars a week. Each of their employees makes another 500 a week in their own salary which means that the employee brought 700 dollars into the company each week. Say it takes just a week for an employee to catch up and perform his duties at 100% of pre-upgrade level and during this time, he performs at only 50%.... Now the employee is bringing in 350 but taking out 500. Your upgrade, which even if it's free, is now $350. This will take nearly an entire month to break even. For what? Long term gains 6 months from now.
What a complete Gish Gallop. Here are some quick answers:
Why Won't Companies Upgrade Old Software? Actually, some will. But, where there is too little benefit, some business rightfully won't .
What happened to that money they saved? Maybe it was: (1) reinvested (2) paid out as dividends (3) passed on to their customers via a reduced selling price.
Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems? Without a cost-benefit analysis for the system in question, the answer is: not necessarily.
Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? (1) Moon rockets. (2) Nukes. (3) Solid gold toilet seats. (4) Led Zeppelin's music rights.
Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded! WTF? Who does both?
Now the crux: who are you trying to drum up business for?
sometimes the cheapest (and *correct*) option is to stay on an "outdated" platform.
Has anyone ever tried to leverage Microsoft into creating an IE6 emulation environment within Win7 & IE10? Wouldn't this do a better overall job of providing upgrade paths with a modern platform?
If Microsoft can keep adding newer .NET libraries without removing the older ones, why not just include old IE libraries and call on them when necessary from newer versions?
The screwdriver you have in your toolbox that your father gave you 30 years ago is old, covered in paint from opening paint cans, and rusty. You decide to embark on a new project to update all the light switch covers in your house, but horrors- how can you possibly use this 30 year old ancient technology? Surely you must go get in your car and drive to Home Depot to purchase a brandy-new shiny screwdriver for the project. You would never use this old technology that, uh, still works...
You see, that's why. It still works. They need an accounting application that adds up numbers. Your software running on IE4 still adds up numbers. Bingo! A match made in heaven. When it no longer adds up numbers they will replace it. Just like when your screwdriver no longer turns screws it will be time to buy a new one.
Organizations that want to run IE6 "forever" have a way to do that: a virtual machine. Their virtual machine image can be frozen and the destination IP addresses firmly locked down to access only known internal Web servers to avoid nasty malware surprises. They can set up the virtual machine to launch and run IE6 as if it were any other application running on the desktop. They can even set up shared server-based IE6 delivery farms if they wish. No problem, and life goes on.
That's the 1 billion dollar question. Whoever made earlier IE versions obsolete is the real idiot.
Because the shit I use now Just. Fucking. Works.
Yes, I use an ancient mainframe based system. I can get all of my computer work (inventory, payroll, reports, etc) done with a few keystrokes.
Why spend $TEXAS upgrading to SAP/SAS when what I have now fits all of my needs?
"back in the day" CEOs made a few times what an average employee did. Now they make 150 times what an average employee does. The executives saw all that 'savings' and gave it to themselves.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
First: Give the business a reason to upgrade.
So far, many upgrades come around because the software company wants to push a different version onto the business, costing them another boatload of money. Unless that different version has something actually useful, why bother to spend the money?
Let me put it another way: How much more spectacularly superior is the spreadsheet now than it was in 1985?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It goes deeper. Think about some of the business-critical applications that a company might have. Business-critical in the sense of "the paychecks don't go out if these aren't running". And they were written over a decade ago for J2EE 1.2 using technologies nobody uses anymore. Nobody in the IT department understands them anymore. They can't find contractors to work on them. The last batch that tried broke it so badly some of the bugs are still hanging around (reverting everything didn't fix all of them for some reason, probably somebody missed a file somewhere). It's not just the code underneath, it's all the cruft in the Web pages the application serves up that's so incredibly specific to IE6 that it just won't work elsewhere. And there's more than one of these monstrosities lurking around. The company isn't even sure how many. They keep turning up in the oddest corners, written to serve a purpose and forgotten about because they do their job and were never formally documented anywhere.
And here's the catch-22: none of the more modern replacements will work with IE6. The company can't replace all these applications at once, aside from the huge costs there's the fact that they don't know if they've got all of them until something breaks. And they can't afford breakage, if these things don't work the company stops working. If they upgrade to a more recent version of IE they know something critical will break and shut them down, but if they don't upgrade they can't put the newer stuff in service.
Just console yourself with the thought that it could be worse. Think COBOL, and why IBM mainframes can still run 1960s-era System/360 binaries.
If I can suddenly do something at half the cost that I used to, the entire sales / marketing team is going to play their favorite game "PRICE WAR!!" and under bid the competition by 10%. Ad Nauseum in a tight, unbreakable feedback loop until the marketplace is right back in the same predicament. Needing to layoff, mechanize, automate, outsource, offshore to become profitable again. Why did you think companies installed computer in the first place? Hint: Not because it was cheap or fun.
Old software? It is called 'Stable' software, son.
And I'm gonna repeat that for the Linux coders out there.
S.T.A.B.L.E.
So let me get this straight: You want the business to spend millions of dollars so the secretary can jerk around on Tweeter and Face-In-a-Book? Sure, for a "hip" startup of a few twentysomethings who sit around and play with Nerf darts all day and grow out their beards, upgrading to The New Shiny isn't a big deal, but real businesses get work done. We don't care if you're some alpha geek badass who knows all the latest functional programming fooey and open-source Lunix whatever; we want you to obey: do what we say, do it efficiently, and do it cheaply. We just want what worked yesterday to work tomorrow and keep raking in the dough.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
My company keeps churning out modern software for customers, while running its own enterrprise on Office/Sharepoint 2007. Yeah, it kinda sucks to run old apps but it would suck even more if we couldn't use this outdated infrastructure to develop modern SW for our revenue stream.
-- Jimtown Kelly
That smells suspiciously of a specialized process/factory automation system that required a custom interface card, the driver of which was written in "clever" MACRO-32 (the VAX/VMS assembly language).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
First, there is the incremental cost of the software AND upgrading hardware to be compatible.
Then there is the cost of being down; idled employees, non-income-producing tech work, training, and administration costs.
Then there is the cost of not being able toservice your customers; missed orders, bad feelings, image problems, botched sales, etc.
Then there is the inconvenience and complexity associated with the upheaval and new ways of doing things. The potential interactions accellerate according to I= E(E-1)/2, so, 3 elements have 3 potential transactional interactions, 5 elements have 10, 10 have 45 and so on. Mistakes and annoyances are inevitable.
The complexity makes the process a lot more than trivial. Just in the last three months, I've seen three large companies (200+ employees) almost come to a standstill over upgrade problems.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
This isn't complicated. They stay with old unsupported crap because they know that the people who set it up are gone, and they aren't sure how to make it work again. They lost the recipe. They would rather saddle their support organizations with bugs that were fixed years ago, than to risk the unknown. The pathetic part of this is, that they miss out on years of bug fixes and performance improvements, because they think they're saving money by laying off the people who built their critical infrastructure. Intangible costs are intangible. ...but, they make it hard to retain support staff...
The problem is that the expenses of upgrading hit immediately, while the cost savings and efficiencies of upgrading accrue slowly. It's difficult in the "what have you done for my bottom line today" corporate environment to get managers to spend money now for benefits later.
Cost benefit analysis bro. Each company is different.
Of course, eventually with old software shit will hit the fan security wise, your NIPS cant protect you forever.
3 months ago, our company migrated from one inventory/invoicing program to another... it took 3 months of every single employee to work hard to migrate all the information that we had in the old program to the new one and start learning about the new one... currently, we're starting to use it correctly, we're still a really far way from having it integrated properly... how much money do you think it cost our employer to make the migration? 3 month salary for every employee with a computer to do the same thing another way! migrating software is NOT cost effective in the short term, your employer lose so much money that they can't afford to pay people to work at a third of their usual speed for 3 months because of the new software, keeping the old systems and software is often the only viable solution because they could simply go out of business after being crippled for so long and losing some clients because of it...
That money saved went to CEO bonuses and salaries most likely. It sure didn't filter it's way down to the lowly stockholders.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
This topic comes up all the time and every time I wonder "why don't they just put the old system on a VM?" Sure there are some rare cases where VM's won't do the job right, or maybe you don't have any reason to upgrade anything at all, but there's very little reason to hold back upgrading your systems just to continue using an IE6 frontend like described in the OP.
Probably not - I haven't seen anything really 'new' in the last decade.
> Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems
So is this meant to be posted so close to the Adobe article about licensing software via a cloud, or...?
Say you've got a small company with 200 employees. They all do their jobs well enough that everyone makes their quotas each year. Someone decides it's time to bite the bullet and upgrade. So the company buys the new hardware/software and the transition is planned.
Now you have to find trainers($) to "update" 200 people's skills, you need to find room/equipment to teach them the new software($$). Create time away from paying work for the training($$$), pay employees to be trained($$$$). The company has to eat the lost productivity and disruptions due to training($$$$$). Pay out for learning materials($$$$$+), pay to have all those power point presentations with the company logo($$$$$++). So now everyone is finally trained to the new standard, but the company still has to deal with the lost productivity due using the "new" system. All the problems due to forced training, and the employees you had to fire or who quit/retired instead of being trained. And the costs go on and on for years, until the company adjusts.
A good example of this is a major Canadian bank the I worked for in 2005; the bank was still using DOS applications running in a DOS Box under NT 4, because the apps worked. It was easier and cheaper to train new employees to use the DOS apps, then to write a "Windows pretty" front end that gave the same functionality. The bank did change to XP in 2007, but all those apps were still there and could be called up in a DOS Box.
And one of the major reasons is that a teller that has been working in the same branch for 40 years; does not need to be retrained to do the job. The teller is doing their job just fine with the same software they always used, once that teller quits or retires a new person can be trained to use the XP front end.
What you gain from a business perspective: the ability to march forth interconnected.
That new web-based e-mail app that's been improving productivity, did you want to shut that down? If not, then the people subject to that incoming browser-e-mail traffic will need to be accessing that resource from a safe (modern) machine.
Remember the days before we deployed company-wide AV and every other week you were down? Since I didn't see a return to those slowdowns in anyone's Outlook calendar, I'll assume that deep down you must intend to upgrade to an OS that can be secured....
In the past, we upgraded to gain access to advances: faster chips, smaller monitors, faster modems, larger hard drives, etc. Today we have to continue that march almost solely for security purposes. Most of the non-security advances are really gimmicks by Microsoft to entice you to upgrade. Nonetheless, leaving people stuck in an old system will render them unable to access an increasing # of tools in the world...
Therein lies the problem: a series of boring updates that threaten people with the notion that they might have to learn something new, without much of a sexy new toy. If you harbor any doubt as to people's ability to procrastinate direly needed infrastructure improvement that lacks a shiny toy factor, checkout some articles on the pre-Katrina state of the Lake Pontchartrain levee system.
There has been such a collective brush off of the experienced people and best practice techniques associated with these upgrades, I wonder if they will be able to get all the needed hands. OS upgrades for larges institutions are painful, and not the stuff those much-beloved recent grads should cut their teeth on.
OpenVMS
Cool and Unhackable, with documented uptimes over a decade on single servers. If the business really cares about uptime it's probably still using VMS. Of course the support staff was laid off because no one ever need to work on that system and it hasn't been rebooted since the big power outage 6 or 7 years ago.
Companies, much like people, don't always like to change what they use or how they use it. This is because newer is not always better. The real issue here is that if you have a business that runs well on the software system that is currently in place, you don't want to lose that. And unless the newest upgrade can provide some proven, obvious win, why risk the proven, obvious failure that we've all seen time and time again (xp upgrading to Vista, windows 7 upgrading to windows 8, every unnessecary bios flash ever, ect)?
"what happened to that money they saved? Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards. However, big organizations keep citing million-dollar upgrade costs as why they won't do it. Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
..
No, the money is going precisely where it's intended, on salaries and bonuses for the top executives in the company
AccountKiller
That goal of "upgrade ancient systems to modern standards" is a fine one but...it costs a lot of money. If the upgrade will save money, increase reliability, improve compatibility, etc. in measurable ways that will increase revenue or reduce costs, then that can be used to justify it. If the benefits are not sufficiently large to justify the costs, the upgrade will not happen. Merely reaching the ever-elusive 'modern standards,' is often not enough to justify it.
Because it's expensive to upgrade and a lot of "enterprise" web apps require IE6.
Companies nowadays only bother about their stock price, everything they do is related to this.
the only location in the company where you have up to date machines is where they handle buying and selling stocks with the money they have in the bank between the time consumers pay for the products, and the time (up to 6 months or so) they pay their providers.
the rest of the company really doesn't matter, as long as it ca keep the flow of money coming in...
The trick, I think, is to treat IT more like a leased resource than a purchased tool. Or should I say 'a depreciating asset'?
A hammer is a hammer, whether it was bought yesterday or a decade ago. You're going to want to regularly inspect both for defects that might render it unsuitable, but you're unlikely to have to replace it 'just because'.
On the other hand, most businesses understand that you need to regularly replace your vehicles in addition to having regular maintenance. When you do so might vary, but there's normally a schedule. Dad's work replaces them every 4 years, for example. There are businesses that don't do this, but they tend to be smaller and run tighter on the wire - sort of like businesses that put off IT upgrades.
Fund the IT department with the idea in mind that you'll be spending X every year in 'routine maintenance' along the lines of oil & filter changes, and Y every Z years to do a major overhaul, and it becomes a lot more tolerable. It's generally cheaper as well, since you never quite get into that 'legacy' category where you're having to hire people back from retirement to explain the system to a middleman so he can explain it to the new programmers so they can build an interface.
I don't read AC A human right
The UI is the only major thing that keeps changing.
Worse, once you got the worker over the hump of learning all the hot keys, the old dos versions of various software packages actually worked BETTER than the modern 'web based' implementations of what the old green screens did.
I remember seeing somebody using a terminal program to log some part maintenance. It's a maintenance tracking system for aircraft - it tracks all work done not only on the aircraft, but on sub components, and will do things like spit out a report on how many flight hours part X has left before it needs to be rebuilt, and on Y before it needs to be replaced, etc... It can also handle you pulling X from plane 1 to put into plane 2 in order to get 2 in flying shape because there's two other problems with 1 at the moment keeping it from flying because we don't have any spare X's and we really need to get 2 into the air *NOW*.
It took seconds in the old system, but over 10 in the web based version. Obviously all the old hands were resisting going to the 'new improved' system. I believe they eventually got the system fixed, but it ended up being a lot more complicated than the project leads anticipated.
I don't read AC A human right
Truthfully, this is a stupid question. It simply doesn't make sense to maintain an application in perpetuity. It doesn't make sense financially, technically or otherwise. Financially, a company doesn't improve their bottom line by continuously maintaining old versions of software. Technically, it doesn't make sense because eventually, inevitably, the tools used by those old pieces of software become outdated and unsustainable.
IE6 is an especially poor example. The code is broken. That's a proven fact. When something is as broken as IE6, it's better to throw it out than to try to fix it.
OK, I'm done bitching.
Meh. It's easier to replace the company than to replace the software. Executives get a golden parachute. Check. Employees get an early retirement or a nice severance package. Check. Customers find a better product from some other company. Check. Big money investors get to invest in a new company and flip it into the market for big bucks. Check. Shareholders of the existing company? Well, somebody has to pay for all that; but as long as they're not paying for new software it's all good. Where's the fun in that?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Thank you, good night.
That's assuming it is working well enough for the current requirements. Having something complex that only runs in an unchanged decade old environment is not always a problem but it can be the symptom of something that is inflexible which could have been improved to make workplace tasks run more smoothly. It can mean workflows are a pile of workarounds designed to cope with quirks of the system instead of the system being there to support workflows that are more in the interests of the work environment. Also old doesn't necessarily mean stable, some utter bits of shit are tolerated for years because they are better than nothing.
I'm actually shocked that the overwhelming opinion here on /. seems to be vehement defense of the status quo. I'm certainly not advocating ludicrous moves like enterprise adoption of Win8, but really, people? Upgrade already. Even things like MS Excel DO take on major functional upgrades over time. I absolutely can't imagine doing my job or navigating my day to day life with even just 10 year old technology.
You see, before computers, companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff. It wasn't until the computer came that they could fire all those people and save a ton of money on their collective salaries. Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?
The invisible hand stole it.
The money saved from firing newly redundant staff was funneled into undercutting the rivals' prices and those rivals that survived this did so because they did the exact same thing. This money can only be recovered by raising your prices back to the old level and if you do that no one will buy your product anymore and you will go out of business.
sigs are hazardous to your health
This is one of the classic problems in most organizations I know: Upgrading IT makes you face a HUGE bill (direct cost). Inefficiency of your employees is invisible and hard to express in real money (indirect cost). It's easy to say no to a high bill, but you pay the salaries of your employees anyway. CEOs are not getting bonuses for efficiency, they get bonuses for profit. They could get more profit by making things more efficient, but that's a more than one-step solution, too complex for most CEOs.
There should be a simple fix for the specific IE version issue. It's possible to run multiple IE browser engines on the same OS as there's an app that does this already (IETester).
It should be possible to create a piece of software - if one doesn't already exist - a web browser that is designed for enterprise use and allows the IT department to specify different browser engines for different sites.
That outdated internal application could be configured to use the IE6 engine - other newer applications and external websites could use newer IE engines or another engine entirely such as WebKit.
It could be rolled out by replacing 'iexplore.exe' and assuming the interface was very close to Internet Explorer it could even be transparent to users and thus very easy to roll out.
The financial system as it currently exists is basically set up to reward short term gains, whereas upgrading a computer system is a short term cost and (potentially) a long term gain.
And then there are the reasons for upgrading...
Supposedly newer software will be more efficient, but thats often just marketing talk and reality often fails to live up to hype. In many cases the new software is actually worse, being more bloated. And in many cases when new software is deployed, users will use it as if it was the old version and thus not take advantage of new features properly.
There is the security aspect of using newer actively maintained software, but then security is a cost with no obvious benefit until something bad actually happens. Also if your software is sufficiently old and uncommon, very few people will be looking for holes in it so the chance of random attacks is actually lower.
And then you have forced upgrades, that is where customers perceive change is being forced on them purely because the software vendor is greedy, and that the old software does everything they need so there's no reason to upgrade.
And one of the key factors deterring upgrades, is poor decisions made in the past resulting in locked in users which makes upgrading very expensive. And in some cases, makes people wary of installing anything new for fear of getting locked in to that instead.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
OP Keeps using that word, but I don't think it means what he thinks it means.
I've seen 98 running some of the machines in a factory where I used to work and nothing has changed.
Also win3.2 believe it or not running some sql software for the plant.
Most significant IT project fail, that's a fact. ... the mainframe!
But upgrading will really lead to more efficient systems?
I have measured efficiency between an old mainframe application and its new and fresh web equivalent, and the result was clear: 37% more efficient on
Think again!
Eventually either the risks involved with the old system become too great for the company to swallow, (if they are known and being represented well). Or the risks come to bear and some cataclysm happens.
Getting the balance right of when to actually do a multimillion dollar upgrade makes good business sense and if you're not adding vast amount of new functionality it's really just a practise of good lifecycle management, taking into account the non-functional risks of the product in question becoming old. eventually those risks do come to bear. I work in a very large national company that made very poor lifecycle management investment decisions (zero) over critical infrastructure for about 10 years, I saw those risks come to bear, the outcomes were horrifying, although not as bad as they could have been, (errors in this company can have a significant and immediate impact on the economy of the country), thankfully the bean-counters and top level IT learnt their lessons and we now seem to have very structured and practical decision making, board level reporting of the lifecycle risks, and real investment to resolve lifecycle risks when appropriate.
If you wnat to use a simple analagy when descibing this stuff to people that don't seem to understand, talk about IT as though it's a car. You would
a. Spend money on maintaining that car, tyres, engines, window wipers, etc
b. Stop the car when maintenance was needed.
b. Replace that car at some point.
This is all required to maintain existing functionality, if you want to vastly change functionality then you would
a. Figure out what the functional requirements were
b. Buy a new car to meet those requirements
And never the twain shall meet...
If a company has a product that is only suitable for IE6, they didn't invest enough in maintenance in the last 10 years!
Working in the software industry, I experience daily that people think that if you buy a software product / application / website that you buy it once and then it "just works" until you want new functionality and it magically keeps working with newer browsers, etc. This thought is wrong. You need to invest money in maintenance to keep your software product up-to-date.
So when IE7 came out, the company should have invested in ensuring their product also worked with IE7. And the same for IE8, Firefox, IE9, Safari, Chrome and IE10. If you do not invest time and money in maintenance, in the long term you have a system that is not up-to-date, is a pain in the ass to deal with and needs to be replaced to ensure your company will not be stuck by legacy systems.
There was every reason for companies to upgrade to Windows XP Pro, since the earlier versions of Windows were definitely inferior and XP has proved to be pretty stable - for the most part anyhow.
But there is little corporate benefit replacing XP with Vista or Windows 7. Virtually all of the changes benefit home users, and some corporate software just doesn't run on Windows 7, or if it does it's horribly slow or keeps falling over.
There is little justification for a company with 300+ PC's buying new licenses for Windows 7 and replacing all the PC's for little or no gain. We are running with most of out PC's being at least 3-5 years old, and other than memory upgrades for the oldest of them, they are running fine. It's the handful of Windows 7 machines we do have trouble with.
Definitely not sure waht to do when it comes to Windows 8 and beyond. Nobody here wants to go Linux, but in many ways that might be a better route.
You see, before computers, companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff. It wasn't until the computer came that they could fire all those people and save a ton of money on their collective salaries. Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?
This is largely incorrect, I think. Most companies that invested in computer systems didn't fire their employees. Instead, because of the computer systems, most of these companies suddenly had more capacity to deliver more of the product/service that they deliver. So companies that invested enough in computer systems gain more market share, while companies that did not invest enough in computer systems lost market share, went bankrupt and/or were taken over by a competitor.
In most cases it's just simple straight forward porting of the application and it's no rocket science. They probably have a zillion workarounds with spreadsheets and whatnot to work around missing functionality already. A decent software architect can probably design a better system that can be built with off the shelf components in little time in as little as a week. Building those systems often doesn't take that long and providing people are using off the shelf components and libraries, the amount of custom code that may mess up will be rather limited. By designing with failure and insecurity in mind, catastrophic failures will be very unlikely, since the built in checks should prevent those before any escalation is possible. Not everyone uses large, interlinked systems. Most are just a single task single system setup. To upgrade those isn't complex or expensive.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
When you plan to install new software, you have to: ...)
- evaluate what the different software brings to you... and do not bring! Usually new software miss the tiny ultra usefull feature everybody uses on the old one. You need to evangelize your users so that the change don't frighten them.
- write the contract (a company don't buy software like you do ion the internet. The company evaluates every word of the licence terms, the software company health,
- install the software and port the old data to the new one (the most feared part. Done once, must cover all, will shape the usage of the new one. Might be the point where the upgrade is a win or a fail)
- learn the users how to use the new software. Might also be the point where the upgrade is a win or a fail
- learn the ITs how to deal with those new problems arose with the new software.
- try to keep up to date with the new one!
At work we still use VAXens from the 90's for some critical work (automated warehouse). We fear it can fail, so we have ready to use VAXen in storage we bought on ebay.
By far easier and cheaper than porting the software part!
Many companies - especially the industrial ones - work on long business cycles. Things like assembly lines or CT scanners are supposed to run for decades.
Imagine a company producing CT scanners who's been on the market for some time. They would have dozens of versions of their scanners in the field, some of them more than a decade old, using old software. To update an old system with new software (such as one supporting new browsers) requires to run a full round of system tests. In the case of medical software, it's even mandated by government regulation.
This would mean you would have to rebuild all 20 (or more) machines in your test lab to perform the tests (simulators are not good enough for FDA) at a huge cost. On top of that, you might not even be able to get some of the parts for the machines that were produced in the previous millennium.
If it works perfectly, why change?
Change for changes sake is the worst a business / person can do.
If you like something, it's familiar, it's comfortable.
Can we please do away with the URGE to update to the always LATEST? If that's what's driving you then you really need to think about your existence!
Upgrading from paper processes to computer-based systems is a huge leap, but upgrading between software versions may not provide an increase in productivity important enough to justify the costs involved. Having said that, the cost of keeping Internet Explorer 6 is high, and getting rid of it implies improved efficiency.
In-house written software that is only compatible with IE6 needs to be fully rewritten to work with other browsers. Sometimes the source code is lost, or cannot be ported easily. Microsoft did succeed to subvert web standards in the IE6 era. Now that has backfired. Poetic justice.
The IT system works, does everything the company wants it to do, it's paid for, everyone knows how it works and how to get there job done, so there is no real reason to upgrade. In addition, upgrading often means a new system, and then you have to migrate all the data from an old, often proprietary system, to a new, often proprietary system, or you new to have 2 systems, the new one and the old one, and a way to get data from the old reports to put into the new reports. Having investigated and been apart of several "upgrades", it often isn't an upgrade.
Cost is only 1 factor, the real problem is closed source software with proprietary database backend and defunct companies who wrote it.
money not spent is not money saved
-
I work with large companies and understand the enterprise custom application compatibility issue. What I don't understand is cant a plugin be written into Firefox or chrome to simulate ie6 API for certain urls? I see this issue as a great opportunity for open source to make huge gains in corporate enterprise by providing a way to upgrade and maintain compatibility for older systems. It's obvious why Microsoft doesn't provide the compatibility, they can't afford maintenance and/or have strategic motivations to promote upgrading as only option. I also wonder how much Microsoft charges for support on extended extended support :)
Companies are not about upgrading software. "Upgrading internally used software" is not a business model.
To make a non-car analogy: why won't Slashdotters replace their entire wardrobe every season? Won't the savings in terms of personal appeal more than offset the small investment in replacing every piece of clothing every 10 to 12 weeks?
Yes, the master of political intrigue has some words of wisdom when it comes to upgrades. "It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones." While his use of system is more generic, the general principle and sentiments remain the same 500 years later. He would have made a kick-ass CIO.
This!!! There is the certainty that something will work, vs a risk that a new version won't. Not worth taking if it means downtime for a day or so. But even more than that is the cost - why would one have gone from Office 2003 to Office 2007? Or upgraded a version of Adobe Acrobat? Or something similar?
With Windows, there is the issue that after 2013, XP will no longer be supported. This is where FOSS makes sense, assuming that all the software that a business needs is itself FOSS, and runs on it. At some point, if the business buys new equipment b'cos the motherboard breaks down, they'd automatically have to upgrade some things that may not be supported on the new hardware. But it does take considerable work to get things working, which is why after a point, a company would be reluctant to spend more money on its IT. If it's an SMB, a one time purchase should do it. If it's large, they ought to go FOSS and have an IT group that maintains it.
Hopefully, as a result of the Windows 8 fiasco, more SMBs would see the sense in going FOSS for their needs.
Whose cookie jar does the upgrade come out of?
Most departments would probably support an upgrade, as long as it comes out of someone elses budget. And the costs of using old software? A different budget once again.
There was an article about light bulbs a while ago and how republican types will actively refuse to buy a lightbulb that saves money in the long run but costs more in the short time. Their minds just are not capable to see beyond the now. And in business that meant "we got to spend how much NOW?" and they never hear the rest.
It is short term thinking but in business, that works because your bonus is for you keeping on budget this quarter, not about the next 10 years.
In general, my advice is to stay the fuck away from these kind of places. They are not fun to work for and they are generally poor clients as well, always trying to squeeze you for the minimum amount possible and then bitching quality sucks. You see IE6, RUN!
Recently, there have been several major feature downgrades that were camouflaged as "software updates". A lot of functionality has been removed, at the expense for questionable "innovation". This is the case not only at Windows 8, that discurages creative work and tries to downgrade everybody to a consumer. It can also be observed at various open-source projects, most notably the Linux desktop: like Gnome3, KDE4, Unity. They all require expensive hardware, or try to do so. They all abandon the proven desktop metaphor for this dreaded "tablet style" that nobody really wants or needs. Just in order to sell more of this fashionable hardware. Productivity has sunken, and power consumption has risen. How many trees will have to die until we realize that software used to be better before?
Microsoft tried everything possible to add proprietary hooks into the web as a form of vendor lock-in. So instead of writing apps that would work on any browser, developers targeted these proprietary hooks. And the vendor lock-in worked so well, that MS locked businesses into an older version of Windows, screwing itself in the process, since they make money only from new versions of Windows.
So Microsoft accidentally did to themselves what they have been doing to the rest of the world for all these years. On some level the mess stinks, on some level, it's nice to see Microsoft reap what they sewed.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
My former company had to stick with IE5.5, because the Oracle Portals wouldn't operate properly under IE6. We only upgraded after getting tired of waiting for Oracle to be able to work with IE6 and scrapped Portals for a home-grown solution.
That is part of the cost of upgrading.
It was passed on to consumers in price reduction. Gotta love capitalism.
I've got at least one customer that won't ever upgrade one software package because the new version doesn't do all that the old version does. Developers are sometimes quite removed from their end users and don't always know nor care what features of their software have become mission critical to some customers. Consequently they use their own flawed judgment to axe this or that feature, because "nobody ever uses that" leaving a segment of their users out in the cold.
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
Computers are viewed as tools. If I bought a hammer, and it's been working fine for several years, and you come to me with a fancy new hammer, you need to convince me why I need to spend money to "upgrade". Will I be able to pound nails faster?
I work at a Fortune 500 company. We have several old x386 machines that are used to log equipment, and have done that job just fine for years. They're not supported by any OEM, but who gives a damn, they don't need to be.
All that said, we're requiring anyone with an XP machine to get a waiver in order to keep it. Not that they won't be able to, but they need to justify not upgrading. Not everything is black and white.
Just another day in Paradise
Asking where did the money go is like asking why someone has a balance on their credit card. If you have the capability of spending money and you need something, you do it.
I fully agree that companies should update there systems on a regular basis but often times redevelopment costs more than maintaining an old system. There are risks associated by not upgrading but the people who make the decision to upgrade generally do not understand the risks, partially because those advocating for redevelopment often do not show all the risks and the costs associated with those risks. Additionally, most of the risks associated with running old systems are less expensive that redevelopment and are not likely to occur. An example would be, the current system currently costs $25,000 a year to maintain and is only supported on IE6 and there is a 5% chance that a major security threat may occur each year costing $100,000, redevelopment will cost $1,000,000 to be done by next year and it will take 5 years to see a return on the investment. Even if the company had a security threat costing $100,000 for the next 5 years running the old system it would only cost $625,000 which is still significantly less than $1,000,000. Taking into account that there is only a 5% chance of a major security threat each year a truer estimate would be that the old system would cost $131,250. I realize there is no scenario that is as cut and dry as above and that there are a lot of costs to review but I just wanted to use this as an example. There are so many factors it is difficult to calculate, Additional risks to look at the current and redeveloped systems may include, maintenance, upgrades, development, security threats, legal fees, hardware, redundancy, third party software, employees, knowledge, time, user issues, etc. Each of these has a cost for both the old and the new and this will help you calculate how much each is going to cost and how much money can be made off of both.
"Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
Yes, of course. But that's an intangible cost that is hard to quantify. Contrast that to the tangible cost of upgrading and fixing all the bugs and incompatibilities that result from an upgrade, and you'll see that it's a hard concept to sell.
An anonymous reader writes
And an anonymous coward responds.
IE6. Several governments and big companies I know use software dependent on IE6. They won't upgrade, citing the expensive cost.
That is what happens when one writes to a particular hunk of code and not to a standard. And I doubt you you "know" these places. Know OF, sure. But know?
Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded!
Got proof for this claim that the places are downgrading to keep IE6 compatibility?
You see, before computers, companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff.
Quite a leap, oh "knower" of goverments/companies who won't upgrade to IE6.
It wasn't until the computer came that they could fire all those people and save a ton of money on their collective salaries.
In late 1970's and early 1980's. Hopefully you have some logical way to tie that to the 2001 release of IE6?
Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved? Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Yes, because companies have a long history of saving money 30 years for expenses in the future. Tell me what planet you are from where the common lifeforms plan ahead for 30 years. Most of what's on Earth today are lucky to plan ahead for a weekend.
However, big organizations keep citing million-dollar upgrade costs as why they won't do it.
Yes. You see AC, IT is typically a cost center not a profit maker. Odds are this Anomymous rant about Carbon paper past of manual processing and "how things used to be done" is being made by a web developer who got yelled at by a boss when s/he got yelled at how the new web site with all kinds of javascript and moving video elements doesn't work with IE6. As a web "designer", this computer stuff is a profit maker. For the businesses not in IT - IT is a cost center. Re-training workers to use new software is expensive. The rest of the world expects to be paid while they train, unlike vast swaths of IT people who learn the new technology on their own time.
Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
For the remaining pool of people typing up letters and looking at spreadsheets of static information, what can't Office 97 do that Office 2013 can do? You cite a bunch of people using Carbon paper - guess what - any machine running IE6 as a native offering will be better than the Carbon paper crowd.
A driving reason to replace IE6 is security, not its "inefficient" nature. (Oh and pro tip: newer web standards != inefficient. Just because YOU won't grow a set of 'nads and stop jumping thru flaming hoops to support IE6 does not make IE6 "inefficient", it makes you, dear web developer, "inefficient".)
* hat tip to Bill Clinton's messaging crew.
It's the CEO's job to forsee and avoid strategic dead-ends. Many aren't so good at it.
As a Linux fanboy since 1994, UNIX and OS/2 guy before that, I was aghast when corpoations picked Win 3.1 on what, DOS 5.0? as a standard. "But X Windows is so much more modular, flexible, and portable! You can even run it on DOS machines!" I was right of course, and Win 3.1 standardizers spent much more hidden money on virus problems than it ever would have cost to get things going with Linux in the 1990's.
The best start companies can make to solve their jam-up is to modularize their old systems using the old tech. Then they can slowly replace bits and pieces with more modern, open, standards-based solutions -- Python? it has a small footprint -- at their leisure. When everything possible has been moved to portable tech, find a way -- virtual machines, emulation -- to move the last pieces. Now at last you can run on a modern OS -- any modern OS, you're not stuck any more.
I see companies making the same mistakes today by standardizing on .NET, the iPhone, and the iPad, with the same uncomfortable vendor lock-in and inability to move to cheaper and more robust platforms as they become available.
The reason companies get jammed up this way is their corporate culture. Short-term thinking has been identified in many posts here. Another factor is, simply, inflexible fear-based, cog-in-the-machine, just-tell-me-what-to-do employees. The bigger and more stable the institution, the more attractive it is to such people. Great, as long as the world doesn't change, which it seems to be doing faster and faster these days.
If the corporation itself was more modular and standards-based, it too would be more flexible, able to outsource, delegate, disentangle various business processes. Do we really need all the departments that our inflexible old software supports? Order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, manufacturing, design, bookkeeping -- all can be outsourced. We may choose to keep these functions in house, but let's define the interfaces between departments and their supporting IT, so that it's modular and we have flexibility in the future.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
As to "where the money went": I work for a small and medium enterprise. It used to be, 30 years ago, that there were hundreds of little mom and pop stores providing that particular service. Each had a filing cabinet and a few administrative staff. Then the computers came, and the field consolidated. Now there are 4 major players in this field, everyone else has been bought and integrated. Now there is a corporate headquarters with an IT department managing a huge market. This would have been impossible with just filing cabinets. The total number of employees managing this business is much less than the combined number of employees for all the mom-and-pop shops.
"Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
No, they're not, because these days, newer versions of a software are commonly less efficient than the old version.
You think they actuallysaved the money for the next rainy day, fooooolish you. Even the most scoservitive f "governments" on a zero based budget, would have given it back to the rich and forgotten the problem. The most conservitive of businesses would have zero based ithe budget item, and paid out the profits to the their owners and shareholders. Invest in the future? The only future they see is the one where they steal your research dollar for their pocket, because they bought the politicians dream.
Because it's like building a new bullet train behind you while still riding on the old one. As much as I dislike antiquated, outdated, clunky old systems (my company included) they *usually* do what they were designed to do really well because they have 10+ years of maturity behind them. 10 years maturity = 10 years of development, 10 years of undocumented specs, 10 years of testing. Granted everything we make today comes with a lot of frameworks, SDKs, toolsets, and many other wonderful technologies to do some of the "cool" stuff for us - none of it will handle the true line of business logic out of the box. The true line of business stuff you're going to be rewriting from scratch. If you don't have the original creators of said old software, or hardcore business analysts that really understand how it works, chances are you or anyone will miss 75% of the clever nooks, crannies, and workarounds built in the original antiquated system. This will balloon original projected estimates and make the folks promising salvation look like fools. It's a vicious endeavor, so never underestimate the task, ever.
The worst are any companies that deal with a lot of money, which includes insurance companies and banks. They have some of the oldest, outdated systems ever and extremely resistant to change because they are the most nervous of change. Oh and anything government related, but that's mostly because they have no profitability whip to motivate them.
My *biggest* complaint is the steady brain drain that's been going on in other departments. Back in the day when "companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff" these same people actually knew what the $@&! they were doing and could explain it to you. These days, everything is automated and done for you by software. Instead, you now have companies with rooms full of people that are professional button clickers and couldn't explain much of anything beyond the screen they look at nor produce a spec document worth its weight in paper.
That was my first thought on reading the headline. If and when they experience the horrors supposedly brought on by IE6, they'll consider it - but you're going to have very little success getting any organization to spend IT money proactively, rather than reflexively. It just doesn't happen, even in my field, education.
Not directly related, but fun. Not as long ago as you'd think, I was called to a good-sized theme park for "emergency repairs" on a computer. What I found was an 8-bit Apple II, running a custom written program from a 5.25" floppy. This ran their water-park wave machine; the program stayed in memory and only had to be reloaded if the power went off. The floppy containing the last known copy of the program had simply worn out. The original programmer was dead, and there was no documentation. There was no part of the system that wasn't completely obsolete and unsupportable; any change would have to re-create the entire system - including interfacing to the wave machine - from scratch. What I did was simply use a recovery program to keep trying the disk read in different ways until I got the program into memory, then wrote it out to a box of floppies. Far as I know, the system is still running.
How would you be losing money by not making any changes? What you mean is losing potential SAVINGS over the current method. The keyword here being POTENTIAL. Potential is synonymous with risk and a lot of companies are risk averse. There's a lot more expense in upgrading than just the cost of the software and hardware, there are also training costs and lost revenue during transition. When I was working at a university the upgrade to a new ERP system was going to cost $15 million dollars for just the hardware and software and we had fairly new UNIX boxes running everywhere. During the upgrade we were required to buy the boxes the company said we had to. Upgrading isn't as easy for companies as it is for people at home. You think $120 for a copy of the upgrade to Windows is expensive? I remember hearing about a copy of the UNIX flavor we used costing $1800 per license which amounts to per copy on a box. Some databases cost in the 6 figure ($100,000) per year range,... PER YEAR, for software!
What I'm getting at is that those seemingly simple upgrades are anything but simple or cheap for companies or large organizations.
In terms of Stability, with a capital S, Microsoft hit their height with NT 3.5.1 (mainly because an application that wasn't specifically engineered for it just wouldn't run on it, but still). For a simple office that only needs file and print sharing Netware 3.12 or 3.20 really was good enough. In office applications I had thought for years that Word 6 or Word 97 (matter of taste) did everything anyone could reasonably need to do. My * on it now is I don't know Word 97's track change and compare capabilities, but I do know that went downhill from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and 2010... And I won't even more than start on this whole insane idea of getting rid of the menus (fortunately alt-e, s, t still works in Excel...).
There really were two points in the OP. First is software in general, and really there is no need to upgrade for upgrades sake in many cases. The second point is IE6 in particular and the security problems inherent therein, but you can solve that one by running a modern version of Chrome or Firefox even on XP... My company generally doesn't care what you install as long as it doesn't require administrator privileges (I left IT support many, many moons ago now), and so the last time I had a website that IE wouldn't load properly I installed Chrome...
To the point of applications specifically engineered for IE6 - a company that does that deserves what it gets in the way of broken support and being hacked. IE 3 was originally the more standards compliant browser back in the browser war days. If you are engineering a browser based solution that is not standards compliant, you have sewn the seeds of your own doom.
Companies need to think about their computers and the software they run like a manufacturers machines. They might last for several years but you need to plan on maintenance and that there will be a point where the system no longer meets the business need. It isn't just "do we have a corporate HR system" with a check box next to it you need to critically look at what you have and what is available and see if the cost to acquire (or the cost you pay by lacking the feature) are worth it. Once it is drop the dinosaur like an ugly girlfriend.
He beleives organizations behave rationally. Must be a young student or soemthing.
You can't really quantify "saved dollars" from an upgrade. The purpose of increasing efficiency is saving money. saving money is less people. You have to be able to show in real dollars how many people will go way if you invest in the upgrade. The answer is more often than not.. none. Thus there's no impetus to spend on the upgrade, it's just a capital cost. What usually forces upgrades is things like regulations (ex: PCI requires updated systems and WInXP will soon no longer get upgrades) and Vendors pushing upgrades for their purposes. Often, updates involve more than just the software update. updating some system may require huge investments in ancillary systems as well to maintain compatibility that could require an entire infrastructure upgrade. Is an accountant today running an Excel spreadsheet on Windows 7 any more "efficient" than an accountant in 1993 running Windows3.11 and Office 4.2? What gets done faster?
Anybody remember the last time Slashdot "upgraded" their look-and-feel? I recall small changes were made and large screaming and outrage ensued. That was a simple GUI thing. I'm sure many heads rolled at Slashdot.
Imagine the horror of trying to move a whole website that runs on IE6 to the latest and greatest available now. IE6 still works. The website works. Nobody wants to learn a new GUI. Nobody wants to train their idiot secretary AGAIN how to use the new GUI. Nobody wants their ass on the line for all that pain either.
That painful scenario assumes the new website actually -works-. Usually it doesn't work. Now you're screwed.
I don't blame companies for not upgrading. They don't get any increased efficiency out of the upgrade, just pain.
This is why you should be pushing for Open Source (at least). Remember, the Harry Potter books are "Open Source" and there doesn't seem to be a problem with making money off books...
"Hardware never lives, software never dies"
- TWR
Management wanting someone else to deal with it, and the length, complexity and cost of development.
I manage two systems that were developed in the early 1990's. Both are 20+ years old. We have been looking/trying to replace them for the last 10 years. Many studies and analysis have been done, but never the approval to move forward with anything. They will be around for another 5 years, at the very least. Business has changed over the last 20 years (go figure), and occasionally ad hoc enhancements are approved every now and again. However the systems in question were designed for a business that has evolved radically since then, so much of the data is totally useless or not comparable to previous years, or particular data is just not collected, as 20 years ago it wasn't seen as something that is now important.
Anyway as someone who supports this stuff to users and hears all the "feedback" about the system, and who has promised users a new system for years with no result, it is more than a tad frustrating as a professional. It will have to catastrophically fail before management will do anything about it, and you know they are just betting that it will happen to the next guy.
that the systems are inefficient and that age adds to the inefficiency. Study Six Sigma sometime and you'll understand the mistakes in your assumption.
We have a generation of senior manangement who have not been a part of innovation anywhere, they have been part of the Regan downsize philosophy. Which is now all they know, they have never known how to take a risk.
We have a generation of leaders who have no idea how to lead in a world which needs innovators, big thinkers, not number pushers. We have managements who only knwo how to balance a budget by outsourcing or cutting. Not a single one of them have the bollocks to take a risk. But these are the days of record profits every year, which only come by fudging the numbers, not by making a new product which people need.
In this context, Small/Medium Businesses.
... outdated does not necessarily mean inefficient.
One word: Risk. The present system, regardless of what that present system is, is something the users have figured out how to work with and around. When you upgrade, the impacts to various departments are uncertain as processes break and projects get delayed. It requires a fair amount of import in an upgrade to get over the bar of not knowing the consequences of pushing upgrades through the business.
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
The real problem is that companies allow web designers to use proprietary browser extensions.
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards
They took the peace dividend and spent it on marketing already.
"Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?"
It disappeared to competitive pressures. Lower prices, etc...
The IT admin they hired back in the early 90's hasn't gone back to school, hasn't learned one new piece of IT software or hardware since landing his job. He's very comfortable with the systems both hardware and software that are employed and he will not go out of his way to change things. In fact when the higher ups, who know nothing about computers, ask him if there are any upgrades they can do, he will proceed to list several options and then thoroughly point out their flaws and shortcomings most of which is BS. The real reason he avoids change is because he hasn't learned anything in the past 20 years and is afraid that his ineptitude will show during the transition and he will be out a job. Simple as that.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
I keep being told I have access to only the finest obsolete equipment
Because undocumented, complicated internal web applications written by people who haven't worked for the company for years only work with IE6. (Thank you, Frontpage.) Our company allows users to pick Mac as their laptop, but then they rapidly find out that lots of things on the company website don't work. And we get to say, "sorry, we don't support Safari. Or Chrome. Or Firefox. I'm not allowed to help you unless you're having a problem with the application using IE.) Which is patently ridiculous, but there you go.
What's starting to change things is the emerging prevalence of tablets. Nobody seriously considers the Surface a viable option, so there is renewed interest in getting the company web apps working with those shiny new ipads the execs are sporting.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It was used to enhance the appearance of the company (financially) to owners or investors. Duh. They can't just retroactively respend money they've already paid out in dividends or executive bonuses, etc. It's LONG GONE. Even if a company did something along these lines today to recognize such savings, and reinvested it in a fund for future up- or down- grades as needed given the realities of the technological landscape, their competitors, (who aren't doing that,) would look more attractive by comparison, making the competitions' stock worth more, and their own by comparison worth less. As a result, they won't get as much money coming in from investments, owners/shareholders will be less happy, and heads will roll, (after the owners of those heads are given nice, fat, compensation packages, golden parachutes, etc., of course).
People outside the business management world might, it seems to me, have a slightly inflated idea of just how much freedom the executives of a company have, especially a publicly traded one, to make either day to day, or nearterm, midterm, or longterm decisions on tactical or strategic matters.
Sometimes those executives DO exercise too much freedom. You read about them every now and again, as being "OUT" at whatever company they HAD BEEN running. That's generally why such people get fired, on those occasions where they aren't also ARRESTED the same day. In fact, in a publicly traded company especially, there are people watching and auditing a lot of what they do, and when they do something stupid, or wasteful, that's when executive pink-slips are handed out. It doesn't have to be in the wake of a disaster, like a massive oil-spill, data-breach, etc. It could be something as simple as a tech company missing a boat they shouldn't have missed. Let's say a XYZ Equipment Mfg. makes type A widgets. With only minor retooling, they could make type B widgets. Another company announces a product that is expected to be huge, (large volume, little competition and large barriers to entry for said competition,) and that product REQUIRES type B widgets. It is generally known they cannot make type B widgets, and the only other companies that can are already operating at or near capacity, and would have to make substantial outlays of resources to begin large-scale production of type B widgets, which given interest rates, market forces, etc., they won't be able to do for several years, (an eternity in this context,) at the earliest.
Our hypothetical company HAS the extra capacity, which is sitting idle. They have people they are about to lay off, and part of their workforce is on furlough, etc. It's like they're playing football, and the guy with the ball's team is down 1 point, and he could run it in in the time left on the clock, and no one is in a position to stop him, and he DOESN'T. Instead, he drops the ball. Literally and figuratively.
The upshot here is that XYZ has to lay-off hundreds of skilled workers, is paying for the land, the maintenance, the other costs associated with having this equipment that is idle, HAD the opportunity to keep those employees, keep their best people from viewing XYZ as a sinking ship, and leaving it for companies with more competent management, and profits are permanently reduced in effect by 8 or 10 or 12 percent, plus the long-term viability of the company itself is jeopardized.
When the board finds out, the architects of the strategy, (presumably the CEO, any president or VP, the chief of strategy, the CFO, etc.) are ALL going to be FIRED unless they can show they tried to stop this colossal blunder from happening, because it cost the shareholders millions of dollars they could have had if those guys hadn't screwed up, or if they'd simply invested in a company with better management.
Incidentally, we are all (and I'm guilty of this too,) upset whenever we hear about someone getting those massive bonuses, severance packages worth millions, etc., but what people don't often consider is that such people are getting paid w
Why Won't Companies Upgrade Old Software?
Cost. Risk of change. Ain't-broken-don't-fix-it, etc, etc. Some companies exaggerate these, but in general, these are real, valid concerns.
IE6. Several governments and big companies I know use software dependent on IE6. They won't upgrade, citing the expensive cost.
Companies and orgs exhibiting such ridiculous policies, though large, are not common. Really, they are not. They are not the norm, and are not representative of the general problem companies face when they deliberate on whether to keep or change large, expensive legacy systems.
Companies that keep a policy for using IE6 (or similar follies.) That's an uninteresting, not-so-relevant problem, one that exists in the realm of stupidity and cargo cult practices, not worthy of a /. front page.
OTH, Companies that have aging, yet good-enough-functional (or at least functionally tolerable) multi-million (if not multi-billion) dollar investments, that is a interesting problem to study (and hopefully solve.) This is a genuine business/software engineering problem worthy of a /. front page.
Do you know what's more expensive than upgrading? Downgrading to the old system they had before they upgraded!
But how often does that happen? What is the general prevalence? And how much does such practices intrude in day-to-day business activities?
You see, before computers, companies used to have room full of people manually calculating and processing stuff. It wasn't until the computer came that they could fire all those people and save a ton of money on their collective salaries.
OH, NOW I SEE!!!! Stop the presses, for no one in the history of interweebzkind has ever realized this till now!!!
Are you familiar with the history of the sewing machine, and how such an innovation caused large, though eventually temporary unemployment of seamstresses and taylors? Same here, same with any other technological breakthrough or innovation. Yesterday news, obvious, self-evident news.
Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?
Sorry, but the answer is self-evident: It goes into raises, building new infrastructure or new investments, business expansion, etc, etc. Money wisely invested. Money absurdidly wasted. Some of one or the other. Sometimes that works well, sometimes not so much. Business and human nature as usual as they have always been, and always will be.
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Really, how much is "a small portion"? And how much a "small portion" is enough to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards (whatever that means)? Besides why exactly would you want to upgrade? If you have a COBOL-based banking system that has worked well for 20 years, why would you want to upgrade (and engage the inherent risk of such a change)?
You are talking about money that can do this or that in a business setting, and yet you fail to discuss the ROI of such changes. A discussion on a business change without discussing ROI is not a legitimate business discussion. It is hand waving.
However, big organizations keep citing million-dollar upgrade costs as why they won't do it.
Because it is true. Do the math. Seriously, do the math. Number of engineers involved in a migration process times average yearly salary time 2 (typically the cost of an engineer for a business is 1.5 to 2 times the cost of said engineer's salary.) Then add up the cost of transition, then the cost of retraining users, the cost of violating SLA agreements, the cost of having downtimes due to problems with the transition, then the cost lost money in salaries by having idle users due to retraining or down time, etc, etc.
The people who cut staffing got their bonuses and are gone. The people who dumped mainframes and AS/400s for Windows Server/SQL Server got their bonuses and are gone. The people who dumped custom in-house programming and fired programmers and sysadmins to switch to a vertical market system got their bonuses and are gone. Now...
Now the PHB in charge of the department is stuck with a crummy vertical market system. No software developers have ever heard of it, let alone have the 5-10 years experience he wants to pay $60k/year for. He's got to upgrade it and make modifications, and there's a "talent shortage" because the few experts in the world won't work for him at his prices.
And you think anyone cares about upgrading legacy systems? All the PHBs care about is cutting costs, getting their bonuses, and moving on to the next job.
The local hospital is going through this. Somehow they got stuck with Lawson (like I said, have you ever heard of it?), and now they can't find anyone who will for them at any price and are looking at consultants.
May not just be the company unwilling to upgrade. could be the software vendor doesn't have a version compatible with newer browsers.
This isn't really a good example of why open source. You probably want the source code however, which isn't the same thing.
Because, dammit, the hardware in totally unreliable at this point. I've got an entire office full of XP boxes and weird shit is always happening, screen freezes, mice stop working. And software incompatibilities...
Just the other day someone plugged in an old GX85 Officejet printer/copier/scanner with a proprietary network interface that translates 10baseT to some goofy last century USB port. No software for Win7 so some generous donor gave it to us because he had XP software. Incompatible voltages fried a 48 hole network switch, halting everything for 6 hours until a replacement was found. After things were up and running they plugged it in again. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
You're not saving any money hanging on to this old crap.
And yes, I use WordPerfect 8Win for typesetting annual reports, it's the best, but I run it on 7 64bit.
Upgrading software would create more jobs, which is something the government opposes.
And it's not Anonymous Coward. It's lazy motherfucker. Get it right.
Getting your shit hacked that leaks data AND forces you to upgrade. All in one fell swoop.
Don't pout. If you would have done a better job designing Windows 8, perhaps you could have sold even more than 100 million units.
And please put that chair down.
Have gnu, will travel.
Our CIO did an information session about a year ago. He made one interesting comment. He said that in WORLD CLASS IT organizations, 25% of their computer systems (hardware/software) were obsolete! An organization of any significant size just can't afford to keep everything current, especially when what you have is running without issue. And given the steady stream of industry stories about upgrades gone bad, is it any wonder organizations will just leave well enough alone and deal with it when it breaks? I don't think so.
The best thing to do if you have these types of systems under your care is (1) warn management about the risks involved and (2) have a contingency plan for when it does break. Of course, when it does break, that won't necessarily stop them from wanting it fixed immediately or placing blame off of themselves (with good managers it should but how many of those are there?).
In order to displace something, the new thing has to be all that the old thing was and then some more (some more crucial features not just some more sugar). And then it has to be cheaper to top it. Until you can satisfy both requirements, trying to get someone to upgrade is probably going to be an uphill battle.
If a company invested a non trivial amount of effort into creating a web enabled system that was dependent on IE 6, it will likely continue to be used until it becomes nearly impossible to get IE 6 to run on newer computers. Can you guarantee that the new system will do something the old system could not do? If you cannot, then it is probably going to be cheaper at any given moment to fix / replace the few older computers that break down then to reimplement the entire system.
END COMMUNICATION
Hopefully you were smart enough to charge them $10,000 for it, since that is what it was worth...
I work for the government.
I'm an assembler programmer.
I'm not allowed to write anything new, of course. And every few years there's an initiative to replace one of my assembler systems.
But my systems work, and the function they do isn't going to change without major acts of Congress. Going through reams of old code and extracting all of the business logic, when the original programmers thought seventeen words was adequate to document a 10,000 line program, well...
They haven't succeeded in fully replacing any of my systems with anything that worked better. One rather expensive replacement had to be scrapped within a few weeks. I'm confident of having enough work to keep me through retirement.
Also, I would think that the cost of upgrading IE6 or any outdated software increases as time goes by.
1. There would be increased compatibility issues.
2. Increasing training for major differences.
3. Increasing hardware requirements. -Lets face it, software gets more bloated as time goes on. Making a big change means you will have to upgrade a majority of systems.
4. Decreasing available knowledge. -Older systems are less well known by the general IT population.
I honestly believe in regular upgrades. But too frequent can also be problematic. And some major versions are painful to implement. (im pointing at you Vista)
Perhaps there is a moors law applicable to upgrades?
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
Indeed sir, you hit the nail on the head - it's all compressed into that one devious little word - "just".
There is no "just" in IT
There is no "just" in computer science.
There is no "just" in any engineering discipline unless you're repeating some kind of routine process that you've done hundreds of times before.
It's am emotive word that covers up the fact that the one using it subconsciously knows that his suggestion is based partly on groundless optimism. My guys know better than to come to me with "just" now, and know from experience that if I hear them using it in a sentence, my probability to can their idea just went up 20% so to speak.
Now if you'll excuse me I just have to refactor the company codebase, and we'll be in good shape "going forward"...
I installed a sharepoint system for our complany, replacing tons and tons of other processes along the way, its now been 6 years and the system is due for an upgrade. We spent about $20k on the initial deployment (not including labor, i am overhead) and estimate we have saved over a million bucks. I'm now asking for $20k to do an upgrade and they say no, it's too expensive, they have totally forgot about the million it's saved. out of sight, out of mind.
I saw this just LAST WEEK at the hospital where I worked [go fired Friday. Poo!] Co-worker had to find IDE hard drive [and cables to connect to it] and I had to find him a copy of GHOST from my personal library to access it. Its not controlling a heart-lung machine but its controlling a necessary piece of equipment in the hospital.
>Now, my question is: what happened to that money they saved?
Its called profit for the stock holders that never get put back into infrastructure, same as why the oil companies can not afford to open new oil refineries,
when they make 6 billion each month profit, they would lose all control over pricing. The reason for a company not wanting to upgrade, is that they
would have to invest that spent money....which they do not want to do. I have seen companies still on DOS...can you imagine that!?!
When it all boils down to who has their hand in a cookie jar, any excuse will be a good one to help cover up the loss.
Very true indeed. However, what is often overlooked is that there is a cost to not upgrading as well. The hidden cost of lost opportunities. But as I said: a hidden cost not showing up on the balance sheets.
No, this is not a troll. Fact is 99% of what people do with computers they can do just as well, maybe better, on simpler older word processors, spreadsheets and databases. I've noticed that lot of best professionals in law, construction, architecture, retail, wholesale, etc have really, really old systems. Like small mono-chrome 386 old. Most of the "work" happens in their brain. If you software guys want to make some real money, create actual "2nd generation" biz software. That would be stuff like a Dragon Naturally Speaking feature that works, and something like Outlook that makes it easier, not harder, to do what it is supposed to do, and maybe even works with the DNS(that works). Something better than the 40yr old single pointer mouse. Maybe some sort of audible feed back besides a few "caveman" beeps and grunts computers do now. Go nuts. Maybe even something to use computer power to supersede the 100+ year old keyboard method of getting around a 'sheet'.
(*Bursts in to tears*). To even mention IE6. It has ruined my self-esteem as an open source web app developer, trying to serve up modern solutions to a non-tech company. IE6. You are my nemesis.
To answer this question look a bit closer at the situation. Are they still using an older OS that does not support IE7 or later? Many businesses rely on applications that are specific to their industry and put off upgrading the OS because they can not afford the cost of buying the newest version of the application. Many of these application cost 6 figures and more. Since there are a limited customer base for them they can not benefit from volume sales to make a profit.
So the actual cost of the simple upgrade could in the end add up to millions of dollars for the company. Many businesses will take the if it is not broke don't fix it approach despite the hazards involved.
Better Yet, if what they have does the job and new software gains them nothing they can see (no savings), then they have no valid reason for upgrading no matter how much they've saved in the past. IOW, If it works, why change?
Short answer: Because when they upgrade all of their systems stop working, they can't get their work done and everyone gets laid off until it is fixed. Even the bosses...
I really wish Microsoft would resist the temptation to break old usages. Sometimes they are backwards compatible and sometimes they are not. Let them test their own stuff, instead of making me test it.
As you said, they saved all that money ages ago when they got rid of the people doing the manual crunching. That's what I'd call "sunk savings", I.E. the opposite of a sunk cost. In other words, all that money they saved was so long ago that the costs they're operating with now are the new normal. You can't just go back and reference how it used to be a long time ago because that would throw all your finances out of whack with the rest of the market, which is operating in the here and now.
Any software that works is better than upgrading, unless 1) you're fairly certain you aren't going to have some sort of catastrophe, and 2) there's a compelling business case for doing the upgrade.