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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 Aren't they also losing money by working with inefficient, outdated systems?"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.
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.
This is an easy assumption to make, but it isn't always the truism you're making it out to be. Many software packages are highly specialized. There may only be a handful of options available that perform their function. Many of them may be difficult and far more expensive than you realize to upgrade, may have been abandoned, may have been ruined by "improvements" during upgrades, etc. When a piece of software is integral to a business, and there is no simple upgrade path, sometimes the cheapest (and *correct*) option is to stay on an "outdated" platform. Often, mitigating the issues with the old systems are cheaper than upgrading the software (if that is even possible).
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.
Often, the people who may have made these tools are long gone (and if a tool is used for years, then the person was probably promoted out because it was a success). And very often they are either built in a short period of time for a specific task and don't scale well to newer systems, or they were built over a long period of time by many different people and there is little if any documentation as the goal was just to make it function and work.
It's not about laziness, it's about resources. Simply upgrading a web browser can render something non-functional. Basically when you make a major change like that, every inch of system, tools, and code needs to be tested, rewritten, and/or replaced. Since the company cannot just multiply it's IT budget by a factor of ten, or just close up shop for the time it takes to do all this so customers/clients are unaffected, it takes time.
Contrary to what some people try to claim, businesses aren't sticking with XP because they are lazy or stupid. Many people really don't understand the business aspect of this. It's not the same as a person upgrading one or two computers in their home.
Businesses have a very legitimate problem -- changing thousands (or tens of thousands) of computers to a new operating system is very expensive -- not just the cost of the OS itself but you have to pay people to do all the upgrading and deal with all the problems that come up. And after you spend all that money, what do you have? You have thousands of computers that look slightly different but work exactly the same as they did before. So what benefit did your company gain from spending all that money? This is a legitimate business concern.
Then there is the problem of software, and this is something that affects many companies both large and small. Many businesses run specialized software that is very expensive and, unfortunately, in many cases, very poorly written, meaning that it runs on Windows XP but often won't work on never versions of Windows. And so, in addition to all the expense involved in changing the OS, there is the additional expense of buying new versions of other software. And once again, once you've spend all that time, effort and money, what do you have? Computers that function exactly the same as they did before. There may be improvements "under the hood" but there is no obvious improvement in functionality.
What you really have here is an inherent conflict between the software companies and the companies use use the software. Software has matured to the point that 12 year old Windows XP, 10 year old Office 2003 and 8 year old Photoshop CS2 are still perfectly fine and able to do everything that most people need. But the software companies need to keep selling software, so they keep making changes to create "new" versions.
But businesses don't want "new". They want stability. They don't want to be constantly changing things because that disrupts their business and costs them a lot of money, with little or no benefit.
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.
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.
An excellent post. Thank you.
Software has matured to the point that 12 year old Windows XP, 10 year old Office 2003 and 8 year old Photoshop CS2 are still perfectly fine and able to do everything that most people need.
I'd like to emphasize this point too, since it seems to be at the center of the problem with the question posed here. Why exactly would businesses even want to upgrade? What does it get them?
I'd push the dates back even further and say that a lot of business software reached maturity -- as measured by the functionality that more than 99% of employees need and use on a regular basis -- roughly 25 years ago. (Web browsers would obviously be a little later, since the modern "web" didn't exist yet.)
What exactly do most office employees do today that couldn't have been done with a late 1980s copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS? Even the first version of Photoshop in 1989 was an instant hit and was perfectly adequate for most user's needs in terms of functionality (though you'd need a Mac).
Now, I'll grant you that the DOS interfaces seem a little clunky compared to today, but 99% of the functionality that most people need was already there. I know at least one person who continued using his 386 until a couple years ago for all of his business needs other than modern internet browsing, with his old DOS-based WordPerfect churning out new documents every week and some ancient version of Excel for Windows 3.1 for his business spreadsheets.
I think the reason software appears to have "matured" in the early 2000s is because we finally hit some magical threshold of computer literacy in the workforce. It's not that the old DOS or Windows 3.x systems couldn't do what businesses needed; it's just that it was still possible in 1990 to be an office worker and not really "do computers," particularly if you were over 35-40 years old and/or in a small business.
By 2000, that just wasn't acceptable anymore. Everyone was expected to be relatively fluent with computers -- including even those older people who were "excused" in 1990, but now had been trained and forced to adopt the ways of the new "machine." Young people entering the workforce had grown up with PCs, so they knew how to use them intuitively. Computer illiteracy was no longer an option.
It should be expected that soon after that moment when computers became entrenched that people would start to realize that "new" isn't always better, if no significant new functionality is added. Early adopters of computers could get excited about the next new version of Word or Excel -- "Wow, did you see what WordPerfect 6.0 can do? Did you see the cool new graph options in Excel 95?" But by the early 2000s those people were outnumbered by loads of older people in their late 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s who didn't really grow up using computers heavily and had just barely caught on to the systems they were supposed to be fluent in.
Why the heck would these older people -- the bulk of the workforce a decade ago -- want to keep adopting a new UI every other year? Why would businesses want to try to get them to? They finally got all these older office workers literate on the systems they had. And what new functionality does any of this new crap give anyone, in terms of basic everyday business needs for the average office worker?
Here we are, 25 years later, with computers that have 10,000 times as much RAM and hard drives 10,000 times as big, and many people still have a clunky word processor that's bloated with too many functions and a spreadsheet that seems to run slow sometimes. The UI is the only major thing that keeps changing. Businesses only care about the core functionality... and once they hit a critical mass of workers who were fluent on a particular UI, why the heck would they ever want to change?
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.
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
It's thinking like that which has lead to multiple failures so far. Arrogance and overconfidence. An assumption that there is always a package or off the shelf tools which can be used.
Multiple "decent" software architects have been tilted at this particular windmill and gone down in flaming ruins.
Sometimes... very old systems have enormous amounts of business rules. There are no "off the shelf components". It's not a question of implementing a screen sort. It's a question of recognizing that given this set of data values, apply special business rule #1017 to the data. In order to do this- you have to truly understand the existing code which on mainframes can literally run to *millions* of lines of pure business logic with almost no interface code.
There is really only one way to "get off of it".
A) Build a sufficiently large team that it can develop faster than the current team developing for the platform.
B) Start redeveloping one system at a time. Do not try to "get off the mainframe".. just try to get the quarterly operating company corporate tax rollup off of the machine.
C) Iterate with the next single system until the remaining systems can be understood and then do a project to remove them.
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The same management that has failed at this three times also set up the SAP project. 2 years of blueprinting (about half of what they needed). "Freezes" which lasted about 30 seconds before development started again. And upon discovering that they had missed 30% of the business rules- they proceeded anyway. Oh and early on they fired anyone that expressed caution very quickly so everyone else on that project got the message. Do not point out problems- keep your damn mouth shut.
It appears to be failing in a particularly spectacular fashion (even for SAP).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.