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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 Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"
Which describes every large software project implemented by a non-software company, ever.
It describes plenty of large software projects written by software companies, too.
Software maintenance is hard. Very few people actually know how to design and build a software system that is maintainable over the long-term, and since even the people who can can't also see the future, we'll never be able to build idealised, perfectly maintainable systems.
The logical conclusion is that we may wind up with critical systems that are working and stable but prohibitively expensive to develop. The best solution to that situation is often to leave the existing system alone but try to isolate it via some controlled interface so you can still build your new systems with a degree of separation and better maintainability.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Had a coworker who in the late 90's had to procure a HDD for an original IBM PC XT and a version of Ghost old enough to read it. The reason, there was a custom program on that computer that interfaced with the PDP11 that ran the steel mill where it was installed and the drive had died but he managed to bring it back to life by snap starting it. He was able to make it work but he very loudly told the company management that they had to do something because that was literally the last new drive he could find anywhere in the vast international parts lookup system we had access to.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
An excellent post. Thank you.
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.
I'd like to emphasize this point too, since it seems to be at the center of the problem with the question posed here. Why exactly would businesses even want to upgrade? What does it get them?
I'd push the dates back even further and say that a lot of business software reached maturity -- as measured by the functionality that more than 99% of employees need and use on a regular basis -- roughly 25 years ago. (Web browsers would obviously be a little later, since the modern "web" didn't exist yet.)
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? Even the first version of Photoshop in 1989 was an instant hit and was perfectly adequate for most user's needs in terms of functionality (though you'd need a Mac).
Now, I'll grant you that the DOS interfaces seem a little clunky compared to today, but 99% of the functionality that most people need was already there. I know at least one person who continued using his 386 until a couple years ago for all of his business needs other than modern internet browsing, with his old DOS-based WordPerfect churning out new documents every week and some ancient version of Excel for Windows 3.1 for his business spreadsheets.
I think the reason software appears to have "matured" in the early 2000s is because we finally hit some magical threshold of computer literacy in the workforce. It's not that the old DOS or Windows 3.x systems couldn't do what businesses needed; it's just that it was still possible in 1990 to be an office worker and not really "do computers," particularly if you were over 35-40 years old and/or in a small business.
By 2000, that just wasn't acceptable anymore. Everyone was expected to be relatively fluent with computers -- including even those older people who were "excused" in 1990, but now had been trained and forced to adopt the ways of the new "machine." Young people entering the workforce had grown up with PCs, so they knew how to use them intuitively. Computer illiteracy was no longer an option.
It should be expected that soon after that moment when computers became entrenched that people would start to realize that "new" isn't always better, if no significant new functionality is added. Early adopters of computers could get excited about the next new version of Word or Excel -- "Wow, did you see what WordPerfect 6.0 can do? Did you see the cool new graph options in Excel 95?" But by the early 2000s those people were outnumbered by loads of older people in their late 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s who didn't really grow up using computers heavily and had just barely caught on to the systems they were supposed to be fluent in.
Why the heck would these older people -- the bulk of the workforce a decade ago -- want to keep adopting a new UI every other year? Why would businesses want to try to get them to? They finally got all these older office workers literate on the systems they had. And what new functionality does any of this new crap give anyone, in terms of basic everyday business needs for the average office worker?
Here we are, 25 years later, with computers that have 10,000 times as much RAM and hard drives 10,000 times as big, and many people still have a clunky word processor that's bloated with too many functions and a spreadsheet that seems to run slow sometimes. The UI is the only major thing that keeps changing. Businesses only care about the core functionality... and once they hit a critical mass of workers who were fluent on a particular UI, why the heck would they ever want to change?
I used to work for a large cement company (#2 worldwide at the time, iirc) and there was a particular model of IBM PC that the company depended on because, besides having a good deal for discounts from IBM, it was the only PC that had enough internal space for a custom-made PCI card that held the relays that were used to control the mixing of the different compounds that were needed for each of the different specs of concrete and other products.
Also, from experience, these PCs had proved the most reliable in all the nationwide concrete plants that had a lot of cement and other kinds of dust, humidity, vibrations, high temperatures and so on. And I don't have to explain what happens when cement dust and a humid environment come together inside a PC.
Newer PCs had different form factors, internal arrangement of components, or were generally more compact than this particular model of PS/1 (iirc) way back then. It took years to refit the cards, and move off these old PCs.... so much of the business relied on them.