IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions For Patches

An anonymous reader writes "When Microsoft terminated official support for Windows XP on April 8th, many organizations had taken the six years of warnings to heart and migrated to another operating system. But not the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Only 52,000 of their 110,000 Windows-powered computers have been upgraded to Windows 7. They'll now be forced to pay Microsoft for Custom Support. How much? Using Microsoft's standard rate of $200 per PC, it'll be $11.6 million for one year. That leaves $18.4 million of their $30 million budget to finish the upgrades themselves, which works out to $317 per computer."

Comments

see where your taxes go

[Anonymous Coward]

right into the pocket of microsoft thanks to mismanagement

Re:see where your taxes go

[Joce640k]

Yep. It's a total waste of money.

Those machines aren't going to implode because they don't get updates.

Keep running them, keep on replacing them. Block all external web sites to employees (which they should be anyway).

Paid for with the public's money

[grasshoppa]

Shouldn't that result in the patches being released for anyone to use?

AHAHAHAHA, sorry. Had to make the joke.

Sounds like Microsoft is making a pretty penny.

[wisnoskij]

Every corporation and agency is independently paying millions and millions to have them continue to patch their computers. I would not wager a guess at how much it costs to continue producing patches, but I cannot imagine it is more than a handful of full time devs.

Re:Avoided, Not Missed

[Roadstar]

XP Works. Vista, 7, and 8 really don't

Wow, this has got to be one of the most opinionated and/or misinformed things I've read in quite a while. XP was the last consumer Windows that was more or less designed for the "isn't everybody an admin?" mindset. Part of Vista's bad reputation was due to it being the messenger that got shot while delivering the "hey guys, the party's over. We really need to stop assuming every user can write to system locations. This time for real." message to developers and users. Naturally the ultra-paranoid UAC settings didn't help with that. In 7 and 8 the new security model was fine-tuned to actually work instead of bombarding users with multiple confirmations for the same operation and as a result the modern versions of Windows are reasonably secure, especially when compared to the security nightmare that XP was prior to SP2.

Re:Yes, but don't you agree there is abuse?

[LordLimecat]

Thats how RHEL does it-- RHEL 5 (released in 2007) goes out of support in 2020. Apple doesnt provide support nearly that long for OSX-- they EOL'd Snow Leopard (2009) in 2013, so they have approximately 1/3 the product lifespan that MS or RH does.

Based on your other comments, though, you really just have a personal axe to grind against anything Microsoft for no real (that I can discern) reason.

Re:About XP . . .

[Billly Gates]

Windows XP is the best Win OS ever made.

It works. It has the best gui. Windows explorer isn't crippled. Apps just work. Websites render just right. Updates do not break it unlike 7 or 8. It works well with 512 megs of ram.

If it aint broke DON"T FIX IT!

The reason they like XP is they had win98 and WinME and remember the crapola experiences, crashes, re-installing the OS, etc. XP was the first OS which just worked. Why change?

People become conservative as a result. Our grandparents who grew up during World War II and the Great depression became conservative and AMERICA IS GREAT during the 1950's when good times hit. Same is true with XP. It came from an era of bad apples preceeding it. Now look at Windows 8 and Vista which came later?

Can you blame them of being afraid of change?

XP works just fine and they do not want a cell phone os and risk nightmares of getting things to work and performance problems. It finally works so leave it and they need a reason to change. There is no reason to change what works right?