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UK Government Pays Microsoft £5.5M For Extended Support of Windows XP
whoever57 (658626) writes "The UK Government has signed a contract worth £5.5M (almost $9M) for extended support and security updates for Windows XP for 12 months after April 8. The deal covers XP, Exchange 2003 and Office 2003 for users in central and local government, schools and the National Health Service. The NHS is in need of this deal because it was estimated last September that 85% of the NHS's 800,000 computers were running XP."
I wonder if these sorts of figures will be mentioned in the next "Total Cost of Ownership" study done by Microsoft.
Okay, smartarse.
You have a lab microscope that costs £100,000. It's been working for 10 years and does exactly what you need. Attached to it is a PC to do image processing. That PC is supplied as part of the machine and includes one-off software to operate the microscope.
Now you say, of course, just ask how much it costs to get the equivalent software for 7, eh? Simple. But the microscope manufacturer hasn't sold anything to you in ten years. So they'll sell you a Windows 7 version. They'll charge you £90,000 for it. Or for £95,000 they'll sell you it attached to a new microscope worth £90,000 on it's own.
What do you do?
Well, actually you work for the NHS. Which had fuck-all money as it pisses it away on management consultants. So instead of either option, you get fuck-all. Now when the attached PC dies, you need to hope your IT guys have an image. When your IT guys move to Windows 7 for the central system, you better hope it can connect to it to store the images. You can't virtualise it because the DRM on the interface cost the manufacturer at least £10,000 to implement to stop you doing precisely that.
Now you're screwed. You can't put your lab slides into the national health system without a lot of manual pissing about. You can't justify buying just the Windows 7 version of the software / drivers (because you might as well just buy a new microscope, and that would come under buildings budget or medical equipment, not IT upgrades). You can't negotiate them down anywhere near sense. You can't replace the machine and - eventually - it's going to die.
And every year the microscope manufacturer puts up their prices by £10,000.
Now multiply by every hospital in the country.
Now multiply by every piece of large equipment (genetics machines, blood samplers, X-Ray machines, ECG's, MRI's, etc.).
Soon, it just becomes better to leave it the fuck alone and wait until you NEED to do something. Then you can justify it, now that it's broken and you need it. And then you can get the government to step in and negotiate a deal. That's what's happened. And the government have said "For fuck's sake!" and gone to MICROSOFT rather than the multitude of equipment manufacturers.
Think I'm exaggerating? My girlfriend is a geneticist in an NHS hospital. The machine she works on is 15 years old, dog-slow compared to the state of the art, and runs off Windows XP embedded. When it dies, the IT team has to track down an old IDE hard drive to fit into it and image it back. And she has to manually transfer images to the "real" integrated system to put them on patient records.
And the NHS haven't even BEGUN to get off Windows XP on the desktop where she works. Precisely because of, and a contributing factor to, this shit.
What I would like to know is how much would it have cost to upgrade to Linux? As a UK Taxpayer, I would prefer my money to be invested in Linux systems instead of Microsoft.
Much more than that, obviously. You don't replace the operating system, reinstall and develop specialist applications for £5 a PC. Of course, paying for extended support doesn't move you forward, so you have to some sort of migration next year.
And really, as a taxpayer (IMHO), you (and I) should be wondering how the NHS managed to piss £10 billion away on a failed IT project, and how we can avoid them doing it again. £5 million across the whole of government is fairly small beer to keep existing systems going, compared to the amount you could blow on a load of migration projects.
It sucks that some departments are going to miss the deadline but the questions I'd like to know the answer to are 'what are their migration projects for next year?' and 'are they on track to be completed before the extended support runs out?'. Have they got a credible plan, and it's just slipped a little, or is it a total fuck up? That, to me, is the big money question.
The UK government should follow the example of the London Council and upgrade to Chromebooks and Chromeboxes. London Council Dumping Windows For Chromebooks To Save £400,000
Let's see: the summary mentions that "last September 85% of the NHS's 800,000 computers were running XP" which translates to 680,000 computers. A Chromebook is like $200 a pop, so migrating all of them would cost $136,000,000. Not such a big saving, is it?
Not to mention that being tied hands and feet to [insert any company here] is no better than being tied hands and feet to Microsoft, you'd have a ridiculous amount of local storage and no control whatsoever over how (and where) your other data is stored. And I can easily imagine that they also have lots of custom-made applications that wouldn't run in Chrome OS anyway.
RT.
I have a perfectly functional laptop that is running Windows XP. The reason I haven't upgraded is that Windows 7 will not run on it. I am not interested in Windows Vista or Windows 8.
And, it isn't 13 years old. Vista was available when I purchased the laptop, but I preferred Windows XP.
£5.5M for a year's support for hundreds of thousands of of XP systems is extremely good value, and far cheaper than any other option.
Of course, they'll still be in the same position a year from now. But in government, if you pass the buck for long enough, it becomes someone else's problem.
I suspect that the uncertainty around the future of any given Linux desktop environment is a good reason for companies to stick to Mac OS or Windows.
So ........ please tell us more about the certain future of the Windows desktop.
And that relevance pales into insignificancy when you consider what you would have to replace application wise, as in the real world people dont just boot to a desktop and then sit and stare at it for their working day.
Office applications might be easy to replace, but how about certified xray or MRI viewers, medical record viewers etc?
No excuses! IF the UK government can pay for continued support, that means you still have to develop and test the updates anyways.,
You should offer users (who are not upgrading anyways) continued security updates for $20 per XP seat per year.
The new version still does not deliver the promised features from ten years ago so why not keep the one with the bigger theoretical feature list :)
To be honest, the 2003 version is far less of a piece of shit than earlier ones. I did a bare metal recovery drill with an earlier version which demonstrated very clearly that it was a shambolic pile of barely communicating different programs as fragile as glass, slow as a dead dog, and only truly reliably backed up with just about all of it shut down. Open relay by default after one patch and some options were only available with registry hacks - it should never have been released in such a state. The only sane way to operate it for only 100 mailboxes was two servers (for when one went down, which happened every couple of weeks due to a memory leak, and for enough speed at peak times) and a real mail transfer agent in between it and the wild internet.
A couple of things.
1) White space is your friend.
2) Don't abbreviate the word people. It makes you look like an 16 year old. Oh, and capitalize the word "I".
3) Take your meds, you are obviously having some kind of breakdown. Calm down.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
One London council. There are about thirty of them covering different areas of Greater London.
[FUCK BETA]
From the vaults:
REAL VIRTUALITY, Seattle, Thursday 2099 (NNN) — Microsoft Corporation has announced a limited one-off extension of availability of its Windows XP operating system to April 2101 after criticism from large customers and analysts. This is the fifty-sixth extension of XP’s availability since 2008.
Through successive releases of Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system, demand for XP has remained an important factor for businesses relying on stable XP-specific software and installations, who have pushed back strongly against the software company’s attempts to move them to later versions. Windows administration skills have become rare in recent years and consultants have demanded high fees. Reviving Windows administrators from cryogenic freezing has proven insufficient to fill the market gap, as almost all begged to work on COBOL instead.
“Windows XP is currently in the extremely very prolonged super-extended support phase and Microsoft encourages customers to migrate to Windows for Neurons 2097 as soon as feasible,” said William Gates V, CEO and great-grandson of the company founder. “Spare change?”
Microsoft Corporation, along with Monsanto Corporation and the RIAA, exists as a protected species in the Seattle Memorial Glass Crater Bad Ideas And Warnings To The Future National Park in north-west Washington on the radioactive remains of what was once the planet Earth, under the protection of our Linux-based superintelligent robot artificial intelligence overlords. Company revenues for 2098 were over $15.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The only thing windows does that linux doesn't is ...
This is just completely wrong.
The biggest thing that windows provides to the NHS is continuity. The second most important feature (a corollary) is a trained user base - one that knows the in's and out's, bug, vagiaries and shortcuts of the existing system. Following on from that is a known, compatible set of hardware that interfaces with all the other systems (after years of development, testing and debugging) and importantly: is reliable in a life-or-death environment where patients wellbeing is at stake.
which will soon change if valve is sucessful
Valve? Seriously? you're talking about playing little computer games in a hospital environment?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Switching to a new operating system is simple in theory but difficult in practice. I work at a company that delayed an upgrade to Windows 7 for several years because critical applications would only work with Internet Explorer 6. Linux is free but there are other costs associated with switching to Linux. I suspect that the training costs alone would be an enormous part of the project budget.
The training costs for switching to Windows 8 would be an enormous part of the project budget, too.
That's what's really killing MS. They've gotten to the point where it's just as expensive to keep riding the MS train as it is to bite the bullet and switch to Linux.
What gives Linux the competitive avantage there is that Linux doesn't have to look and feel different in major and minor ways every time you upgrade it, thus requiring expensive retraining. They're not driven by a marketing department. What do they call the "Network Neighborhood" in this release???
This is exactly it. I know one hospital that recently "refreshed" their hardware to new Quad core 4th generation i5 desktops. The OS - Windows XP SP1. Why?
The specialist medical applications that they run are too expensive to upgrade, and the version they run doesn't support XP SP2. Medical software is not cheap - something like a "results reporting system" which aggregates test results from multiple departments (e.g. blood chemistry, hematology, MRI, ultrasound, physiology, cardiology, etc.) and presents them to a physician - can cost $1million for the license. For a PACS (X-ray viewing and archiving) software, the license could easily cost $10 million for a large hospital (or group of hospitals).
If it would cost you $2 million to replace a specialist app, then you may be stuck with having to use an older OS - especially, if the app developer has gone out of business and you no longer have any support (very, very common in the medical industry).
Some of the more forward thinking IT departments have started rolling out Windows 7, and using some sort of virtualization service, to run the specialist apps under the appropriate OS/IE version/Java runtime/.NET runtime that each one needs. The difficulty with this, is that you essentially have not just your Win7 environment to manage, but also all the individual virtualized run time environments. The administrative burden that this requires can be substantial.
Or maybe just eat some Ubuntu
Ahhh, yes the Ubuntu meal analogy.
Where the cooking instructions are vague, wrong and refer to an early beta version of "grub" and only work if you have exactly the same cooker as the inventor. Where you have to spend half a day growing your own ingredients, just so's it is "free". Where the size and shape of the plate you need changes every 6 months and none of the cutlery matches. As for the list of contents, all it says is:
may contain nuts
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons