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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 Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"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"Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"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.
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.
In order to upgrade the systems they also have to upgrade the back end applications that were hard coded to require IE6. These applications were often merely the front ends to legacy financial, database, purchasing, ERP and so on. You have to upgrade all of the middleware systems as well as the back end systems fed by the middle ware systems. IE 6 often required custom hacks in order to get it to work at all, and once you got it working it was your head if you messed with it.
You also had things like right management through Internet Explorer for Windows based systems that only worked in version 6. In short you could easily spend millions of dollars upgrading back end systems in order to get them to work with something newer than Internet Explorer 6. The larger the enterprise / agency the more systems that were dependent on it that very version and the worse the problem was.
All of which discounts traditional migration costs of migrating computers, licenses, testing software, hardware, implementing a hardware independent image, creating packages, testing with new versions, testing new versions with old versions etc, etc, etc. For most IT departments a migration is the largest project that they will do every few years. The consultants that work migration and that know what their doing are few and far between. You could probably fit every single qualified consultant from every agency in the country in a single conference room with room to spare. Needless to say you can generally count on paying over $10,000 a week per consultant to get someone that knows what their doing.
Migrations are very complex work that involve a lot of details, project management, hardware expertise, vendor relationships, management consultation, software license issues, SQL database work, OS work, infrastructure work and so on. Point being it's a bit more involved than rolling out the newest version of Internet Explorer from the Microsoft update site and you sound like you desperately need a consulting company before you cost your company far more money than you would pay in their fees.
It's discontinued and is no longer supported by the original software vendor and you don't have the source code.
I knew a shop that had a critical application that was 30 years old. However, they had enough of a clue to put themselves in the position where they could maintain the product themselves. Many CxO's came and went trying to replace that old dinosaur but newer alternatives could never quite pass muster. They weren't good enough.
Sooner or later all of those "business reasons" you used to justify buying the shiny commercial product from the darling of industry will evaporate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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).
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
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.
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 guess you've never worked on a payroll system for any moderate-to-large enterprise. Payroll is among the hardest things to outsource well. For a recent example of how well it typically goes, google "NZ Novopay news". Paying a few thousand teachers isn't hard, right?
Outsource your payroll. Now, add in the HR hooks: ordinary recruit-review-release stuff, and things like mandatory continuing education and certification requirements for a few dozen different professions, bizarre rostering rules about shift skill and cert mixes, etc., etc. Hook up the outsourced payroll system to your IT auth system and email, your general ledger and banking, your intranet (for leave request workflows)....
Good luck! How much did you say you trust your payroll service provider?
"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
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.
GP's starting point is defensible enough; simplify the process so you don't have all these special conditions and it isn't that hard to provide service.
The problem comes when you need to add a layer of complexity. You say put everything in a base pay rate, but in order to recruit one person you need to give him a car allowance. Another insists on non-standard vacation provisions. Ultimately, it is the exceptions not the rules that define the process.
So, if you want to reel things in, everyone needs to come to an agreement... to compromise. Just getting to that point can take years, and the result often doesn't really simplify things!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
It's thinking like that which has lead to multiple failures so far. Arrogance and overconfidence. An assumption that there is always a package or off the shelf tools which can be used.
Multiple "decent" software architects have been tilted at this particular windmill and gone down in flaming ruins.
Sometimes... very old systems have enormous amounts of business rules. There are no "off the shelf components". It's not a question of implementing a screen sort. It's a question of recognizing that given this set of data values, apply special business rule #1017 to the data. In order to do this- you have to truly understand the existing code which on mainframes can literally run to *millions* of lines of pure business logic with almost no interface code.
There is really only one way to "get off of it".
A) Build a sufficiently large team that it can develop faster than the current team developing for the platform.
B) Start redeveloping one system at a time. Do not try to "get off the mainframe".. just try to get the quarterly operating company corporate tax rollup off of the machine.
C) Iterate with the next single system until the remaining systems can be understood and then do a project to remove them.
---
The same management that has failed at this three times also set up the SAP project. 2 years of blueprinting (about half of what they needed). "Freezes" which lasted about 30 seconds before development started again. And upon discovering that they had missed 30% of the business rules- they proceeded anyway. Oh and early on they fired anyone that expressed caution very quickly so everyone else on that project got the message. Do not point out problems- keep your damn mouth shut.
It appears to be failing in a particularly spectacular fashion (even for SAP).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Oh yea... and "C" will probably fail. So return to B and just iterated until one day... after nine years, you realize you finally converted the last system.
Then lay off everyone who helped you get there and take a big bonus for reducing labor costs. (yea-- they did that too).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.