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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 Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
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.
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.
But,OTOH, let's put it off until next quarter and let them worry about it.
Also, keeping the existing system has a 100% chance of being a nagging pain in the ass; but a pretty minimal chance of failing catastrophically in some novel way that the IT minions aren't already familiar with.
If we start development on a new system, it has a decent chance of being better; but a nonzero chance of going down in a firestorm of project-management failure, buck-passing, and overpriced Accenture code monkeys, which will make us look like total fuckups...
Uhhh...you ever actually TRY to switch over a large firm with a shitload of one off and small company software to a new OS? that shit AIN'T fun, hell I'd rather get kicked in the nuts with steel toed boots, the pain won't last as long.
It never fails, you end up with software made by companies that aren't around anymore, or those real asshole companies whose answer to everything is "shell out several thou for new licenses" (Quickbooks I'm looking at YOU) and that is IF you can buy new licenses and get the damned thing to work, you'd be surprised how many SMBs end up with "some program written by Chuck who don't work here anymore" that was only supposed to be a quick and dirty "hold us over until next quarter" but ends up becoming this mission critical house of cards that you are afraid to look at funny or it'll fall down. Then of course there is the hardware, there is nothing like having to tell middle management that all those personal printers they got for the managers have to be shitcanned because there isn't drivers for the new OS, and again that is if you are lucky and its just something like a printer,not some multi thousand dollar piece of hardware that the company doesn't support on the latest and greatest..
Now I can see giving them a browser and using GP to keep IE 6 strictly on the Intranet, that makes sense and won't give middle management a coronary when they get the bill, but all those"oh you should just upgrade" are obviously people that have never actually done a large rollout because if they had they'd know that there is NO "just" when it comes to a large business, you are talking weeks to months of slow, tedious, headache inducing work and it is NOT a pleasant experience for anybody involved. That is why I don't do corp no more, got tired of the ulcers and the headaches, not for all the tea in China would I want to do another upgrade rollout, no chance in hell.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"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
Seriously? Clearly you have never done ANY Enterprise web development. We have north of 8 Million Lines of code. Lots of it Javascript and tons of it CSS. Changing IE versions (And all the web hacks that involves) without relying on compatibility mode involves around 3-4,000 Development hours if you include QA and all other time. $100/Dev Hour is what we estimate. So is it really worth it to Change IE versions at $4,000,000 every time IE comes out with another still horribly standards flouting release? No thanks. I'll stick to what works which is compatibility mode (Essentially IE 7) And we are a relatively small web development shop, hate to see what it looks like for larger corporations. Cross-Browser without hacks is a pipe dream that people who have never tried doing real web development have. Maybe sometime it will work well. For now it just means four times the development time on UI and six times the QA time to verify each version. And for what?
Are we going to have to upgrade it eventually? Absolutely. Is it important to do so the second that a new IE version comes out? Hell NO.
You seem to have absolutely no clue as to how real companies operate. We might have acquired 4 different apps through acquisition in a single year. And you are incredibly naive if you think an "app" just means some legacy accounting package. An "app" can be the driver package and software that runs a $120,000 electron microscope. If you really think IT is going to tell R&D to chuck their electron microscope because Microsoft isn't making enough money on the patches for the $500 PC that runs it, you might want to think of a career outside IT. Crap, we have $12,000 embossing machines that only run with DOS software.
Your attitude is what we see from recent grads with absolutely no experience. Yes, all this makes sense in a classroom, but the real world is quite messy...
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
It costs money to redevelop a system with 10 years of development. Not 10 years worth- but easily 5 years worth and that's after 3 years of having a smaller staff analyze the problem.
And the new system will lack features.
And the old system will continue to change during development despite promises to freeze it.
At my old company they had a main frame that they have declared three times now since 2000 that they would be "Off the mainframe in 12 months". I hear the latest effort just failed.
Because they do NOT want to hire the 30 programmers and pay them for 3 years to rewrite all the software. And the software is mostly ALL required and irreplaceable with packages.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
What exactly do most office employees do today that couldn't have been done with a late 1980s copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS?
Off the top of my head:
- WYSIWYG. Sure it might not be theoretically as powerful as something like LaTeX, but all the theory in the world doesn't help people who aren't versed in the arcane -- and that's most of the people. Of course this only brings us to Windows 3.1 -- past DOS/WordPerfect but not quite up to XP.
- Staying stable for more than a day or two. Or an hour or two in a lot of cases. Windows XP was the first introduction the consumer and small business user had to a (mostly) stable operating system. Its not perfect sure, but its an enormous step forward from 98 or ME in terms of stability.
Sure Mac already did WYSIWYG a few years earlier and they've always been (comparatively) stable, but this is still a bit before the iPod made Apple a household name -- they were mostly only used by a few niche markets at the time and the significantly higher price tag over a comparable PC (and then not being able to use most software to boot) would have turned a lot of people away long before they had to worry about stability -- assuming they could find a local store that sold Macs in the first place.
For that matter, the rise of Apple probably didn't hurt the whole situation either -- it would mark the first time that average people would realize that "computer" != "Windows" and start considering possibilities and alternatives rather than just taking whatever gets shoveled at them.
It's thinking like that which has lead to multiple failures so far. Arrogance and overconfidence. An assumption that there is always a package or off the shelf tools which can be used.
Multiple "decent" software architects have been tilted at this particular windmill and gone down in flaming ruins.
Sometimes... very old systems have enormous amounts of business rules. There are no "off the shelf components". It's not a question of implementing a screen sort. It's a question of recognizing that given this set of data values, apply special business rule #1017 to the data. In order to do this- you have to truly understand the existing code which on mainframes can literally run to *millions* of lines of pure business logic with almost no interface code.
There is really only one way to "get off of it".
A) Build a sufficiently large team that it can develop faster than the current team developing for the platform.
B) Start redeveloping one system at a time. Do not try to "get off the mainframe".. just try to get the quarterly operating company corporate tax rollup off of the machine.
C) Iterate with the next single system until the remaining systems can be understood and then do a project to remove them.
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The same management that has failed at this three times also set up the SAP project. 2 years of blueprinting (about half of what they needed). "Freezes" which lasted about 30 seconds before development started again. And upon discovering that they had missed 30% of the business rules- they proceeded anyway. Oh and early on they fired anyone that expressed caution very quickly so everyone else on that project got the message. Do not point out problems- keep your damn mouth shut.
It appears to be failing in a particularly spectacular fashion (even for SAP).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is exactly true.
and remember it isn't just the software that needs upgrading when installing new software. It isn't just training. it is the new business methods, the new organizational work flow that also must be upgraded.
2 months ago we upgraded the ERP software. however since it doesn't work exactly like the old software(thank the deities) people are complaining. People take a long time to understand things. little things nag and nag until they become bigger points. With an company of 20 people it has been a headache not because the software and data transfer which itself going about 97% successful(the old software stored some historical data stupidly). The Headaches came from the people who couldn't grasp their way into understanding a new process. From those who had to change how they interacted with the new software.
Lastly when a business saves money today, it gets spent on something else. it doesn't actually get saved.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.