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 Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"

Comments

What a relief.

[LordLimecat]

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.

Re:What a relief.

[wvmarle]

You don't understand the word "broken", obviously. Or you misapply it.

The current software works, and as such is not broken. Changing parts to incompatible parts breaks it - but that doesn't mean the software itself is broken. It just means the parts are incompatible. You can't always just swap out parts for different parts, they don't always work nicely together.

If the company has a system that works on IE6 but not on IE10, then they should not try to change IE6 for IE10 for that system. They should stick to that. It works, it will continue to work.

Oh but IE6 is so insecure, you will say. Yes it's insecure when you're using it for web browsing. That is just not a good idea (plus that it can't render most modern sites properly). Of course you don't use it for general web browsing, but that doesn't mean you can't use it for your internal applications any more. How old it is, is irrelevant. That it works, is relevant. That it works well, reliably, and predictably, that's relevant too: and I'm sure a 10 year old platform is more predictable than a 10 month old platform, simply thanks to the long term experience.

Re:What a relief.

[girlintraining]

You are saying that most IT departments are incompetent.

No, he's saying the budget for IT is very limited, and they don't want to invest in re-development, testing, and deployment. IT is viewed by most companies as a cost center. It's a "necessary evil" in the business process, and this is what managers are taught in schools across the country.

Why are there 15 different apps that are coded to a specific web browser version? A decent IT department would stop that.

You make it sound like the 'IT department' is somehow all-encompassing and all-knowing, and everyone is on the same page. Anyone who's worked more than a few months in this field knows that there's no such thing as an 'IT department'. There are many departments, many teams, all doing 'IT' things. Those departments sometimes work at cross-purposes, there's politics, communication barriers, etc. It's called bureauacracy and you quickly learn overcoming it takes more time than actually working with the technology. A single change to a server can take months of meetings, change requests, and may eventually be shot down by someone who's overworked and has more important things to do (to them anyway!), and so it gets rejected.

here would be one or two apps, and they would be more genericized, and maintained by a trained IT staff, not built by a secretary who knows some macros, or an engineer who built an app because "how hard can it be?".

Remember what I just said about bureauacracy? Sometimes it's just too damn hard to overcome interdepartmental politics and red tape and people roll their own solutions to get the job done. Is this the mythical 'IT Department's' job to smooth over every ruffled feather, fix every political tug of war? No. You work with the tools you're given, and you support what's handed to you; Because bitching will get you fired, and silently suffering will get you a glowing reference to move to another department or company where you'll get to suffer over a brand new set of design screwups and political crap. That's the difference between business reality and the business fiction you learn about in CSci and are trying to apply here.

The 15 apps generally come about because the IT department sucks. Then the IT department blames the users or budget makers for why the technology is broken.

In my experience, IT doesn't cast blame about, they're the ones being blamed because of this magical thinking that IT can just sprinkle magic fairy dust over complex and intractable political and business problems. Most of what I do in IT has nothing to do with computers; It is about the people.

The technology is stupid easy for me. Getting people to get the hell out of my way so I can do something with it, well... that's the rub.

Re:Yes

[Ferzerp]

This is an easy assumption to make, but it isn't always the truism you're making it out to be. Many software packages are highly specialized. There may only be a handful of options available that perform their function. Many of them may be difficult and far more expensive than you realize to upgrade, may have been abandoned, may have been ruined by "improvements" during upgrades, etc. When a piece of software is integral to a business, and there is no simple upgrade path, sometimes the cheapest (and *correct*) option is to stay on an "outdated" platform. Often, mitigating the issues with the old systems are cheaper than upgrading the software (if that is even possible).

Re: Yes

[AudioEfex]

Exactly. Many companies of a decent size have their own internal apps, tools, etc. that are not commercial products. They can range from simple tools (say an internal web page that runs a query over several unrelated systems to show a data set) to entire systems (many large companies may start with a commercial product then "Frankenstein" them internally to tailor them to the individual companies needs.

Often, the people who may have made these tools are long gone (and if a tool is used for years, then the person was probably promoted out because it was a success). And very often they are either built in a short period of time for a specific task and don't scale well to newer systems, or they were built over a long period of time by many different people and there is little if any documentation as the goal was just to make it function and work.

It's not about laziness, it's about resources. Simply upgrading a web browser can render something non-functional. Basically when you make a major change like that, every inch of system, tools, and code needs to be tested, rewritten, and/or replaced. Since the company cannot just multiply it's IT budget by a factor of ten, or just close up shop for the time it takes to do all this so customers/clients are unaffected, it takes time.

Re:Yes

[rudy_wayne]

Contrary to what some people try to claim, businesses aren't sticking with XP because they are lazy or stupid. Many people really don't understand the business aspect of this. It's not the same as a person upgrading one or two computers in their home.

Businesses have a very legitimate problem -- changing thousands (or tens of thousands) of computers to a new operating system is very expensive -- not just the cost of the OS itself but you have to pay people to do all the upgrading and deal with all the problems that come up. And after you spend all that money, what do you have? You have thousands of computers that look slightly different but work exactly the same as they did before. So what benefit did your company gain from spending all that money? This is a legitimate business concern.

Then there is the problem of software, and this is something that affects many companies both large and small. Many businesses run specialized software that is very expensive and, unfortunately, in many cases, very poorly written, meaning that it runs on Windows XP but often won't work on never versions of Windows. And so, in addition to all the expense involved in changing the OS, there is the additional expense of buying new versions of other software. And once again, once you've spend all that time, effort and money, what do you have? Computers that function exactly the same as they did before. There may be improvements "under the hood" but there is no obvious improvement in functionality.

What you really have here is an inherent conflict between the software companies and the companies use use the software. Software has matured to the point that 12 year old Windows XP, 10 year old Office 2003 and 8 year old Photoshop CS2 are still perfectly fine and able to do everything that most people need. But the software companies need to keep selling software, so they keep making changes to create "new" versions.

But businesses don't want "new". They want stability. They don't want to be constantly changing things because that disrupts their business and costs them a lot of money, with little or no benefit.

Wrong question

[Charliemopps]

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.

Re:Yes,

[StuartHankins]

Gotta agree with you... you go through the process and somebody forgets to test some "little thing" that is no longer supported in the new version. If it's commercial software, that can leave you scrambling to work around the issue.

With custom software it's still a pain but you seldom run into something that absolutely can't be done, usually it's something takes awhile to program around and you impact business in the meantime. No matter how carefully you examine the requirements you will always miss something, it's the nature of the beast. If you rely on third party tools to plug into your IDE you may find the licensing has changed drastically and it may no longer be acceptable to use that widget or tool.

And let's not forget about bugs... you may run into something that is documented, works in testing, and when it hits production it just doesn't work when you have hundreds of people hitting it at once. Good design solves a lot of that but you can always have scenarios that can't be adequately tested before you roll it out. Parallel systems help with that but at some point you spend so much time and effort keeping everything in sync while you prepare for full deployment that it's easier to cut off the old system and just deal with the issues as quickly as you can.

running only on an OpenVMS, which runs

[tengu1sd]

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.