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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 Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"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"Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Amen. I can't believe people are leaving that out. The stories about failed IT projects abound on this site - you'd think people would recognize risk aversion.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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?
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.
"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.
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!"
One of the many stupid comments of someone who doesn't understand economics. And that seems to account for most people here.
Where the savings really went? To YOU, the customer. Yes, really. Why do you think the quality of life has improved so much over the past decades? It's because productivity has increased so much. A single person can produce much more value than they could a few decades ago - and the computer and other parts of automation are a great part of that.
Previously a company had to employ those hundreds of typists, they have been replaced by computers, that do the work faster (especially the revisions that don't need to be typed out completely again, and copies, thanks to the photo copy machine). That saved a lot of money, which meant a company could lower the prices of their goods and/or services, to gain a competitive edge over the other companies that still used the typists.
Soon enough of course either companies automated and cut costs (and prices), or went out of business. Those that are still in business are not necessarily making a whole lot more money: they have to lower prices to stay competitive, margins will remain roughly the same. That's what an open market does for you.
Thinking that businesses still have all that money to employ the typists, but stuff it somewhere else, that's just not true. That money isn't there. They now make enough money to support their current, automated infrastructure - and are still always trying to lower the cost of that infrastructure. Continuing to use software that works, instead of pouring money into creating software that might work, is just one example. Many, especially larger, companies will also try to standardise their computers: making support easier, and making replacement easier when one breaks down (computer broken? Drop in another one, employee can continue their work, broken computer can be checked out later).
Trying to move your business critical piece of software that works just fine in IE6 to a newer platform is a costly risk. It may involve complete rewriting of the application - good luck making it work exactly the same, and as reliable as the current software. It means replacing a well tested, well understood platform with something you don't know all the quirks so well of. It means spending a lot of money, with the risk of it not working in the end, or worse: thinking that it works, moving your business to the new platform, and seeing it break costing you multiples in lost business.
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...
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.
Try not to forget that as you become more efficient you lower prices to attract more customers.
Unless you are a government propped up shit hole telco.
There is a reason that at one time a TV was only for the rich. Now people on welfare have 3 HD TVs and cable.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
Now add dry rot, termites and mold into the kitchen/bathroom.
Actually, profits are at an all time high, as is executive compensation. Average wealth hasn't even come close to matching productivity gains, so the money did not go there. If it had, we'd see average single income families able to afford 6 houses and 12 cars.
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's a totally stupid argument. It'd never happen because owning six houses and twelve cars is no way ever going to be average. Not many families have a need for twelve cars. If more people are rich enough to try to go after a second house, the housing market will go up to compensate for that. After all, there is roughly one home per family in most countries (if that many). I wouldn't even want six houses, of which five are empty most of the time (renting out is in such a scenario of course not an option, as everyone else also has several houses already).
Yet the average person nowadays doesn't think twice about taking a plane to go on holiday. Or to go for a second holiday in a year. Driving is so cheap no-one will think twice about cost of fuel before turning the key and driving that 500m to the nearest supermarket. The average family has a huge flat screen TV - as a child I went to the neighbour's because they had a colour TV that was twice the size of our black/white TV. The cost of all those things compared to average income is just so much lower than it used to be, just a few decades ago.
Profits are at an all-time high, but don't forget to count in inflation: just to stay level in real value, profits have to go up by the same rate as overall inflation.
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
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
money not spent is not money saved
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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 :)
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.
and comments like that are why businesses are idiots. owning 3 HDTV's is nothing. you are talking about $1500 spread over 10 years.
if you want to look at something look at how a the average CEO today makes 100 times the amount of someone from 1970 but the average employee only makes 1.1 times the amount of someone from 1970.
Where is that money going? it isn't being used to build the economy. it isn't growing businesses. Wall street looks like the recession never happened, with record breaking gains. But the REAL economy is still in massive recovery mode.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
Why do you think the quality of life has improved so much over the past decades?
For whom has the quality of life improved "so much" over the past decades? What evidence do you have for this assertion?
A single person *can* produce much more value than they could a few deacades ago, but wage increases haven't kept up with productivity increases. All that extra productivity is being stolen by the rich. Decades ago a single median income was enough to own a home and raise a family. Today, not so much.
Here's what reality looks like:
In case you missed it, I'll repeat. "The vast majority averaged a mere $59 more in 2011 than in 1966."
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Where the savings really went? To YOU, the customer. Yes, really. Why do you think the quality of life has improved so much over the past decades? It's because productivity has increased so much.
Actually, over the past few decades I would have said that the quality of life had deteriorated, except for the top few percent. Shiny geegaws, yes, they've improved.
Oh, please. We have far less crime, longer lives, safer cars that take less gasoline, better and more varied food, and (for those of us in developed countries) walk around with access to most of human knowledge in our pocket. Life may not be perfect but it's a damn sight better than it used to be.
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?
Not profits in real dollars, silly, profits and executive compensation as a percentage of gross corporate income. Funny how executive compensation soared while regular wages remained nearly static (taking inflation into account).
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
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 -
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.
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.
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.
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.
This isn't really a good example of why open source. You probably want the source code however, which isn't the same thing.
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
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. "
Actually, in a healthy market, cost is supposed to be driven to approach the marginal cost of production no matter how wealthy the buyers.
Meanwhile, income has slipped against inflation while corporate profits and executive compensation have grown against inflation and most families now need two incomes where one was enough before.
We have color rather than black and white TV because technological advances have made it cheap, not because of productivity gains. The people who are pocketing the productivity gains thank you for supporting their fallacy though.
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.
Why do you think the quality of life has improved so much over the past decades?
Have you seen reality TV, SyFy, or the History channel these days?
>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.
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.