Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's like Toyota told all owners of older Toyota vehicles that the vehicles are unsafe now and owners must buy new vehicles or pay millions of dollars to keep them. Except its worse: Software doesn't have mechanical wear.
A better analogy would be for Toyota to stop manufacturing parts for very old cars, and most car manufacturers do just that. Aftermarket is more able to fill the void in that case, but it's the same concept. And let's be real, $200 scaled up to a car would be thousands, not millions. Software doesn't have "mechanical" wear, but it has ongoing discovery of security vulnerabilities that require maintenance from the vendor. Delivering that maintenance costs money.
Even the newest systems that shipped with XP are really old now. Hell, I still use one at work (not by choice), and it's a slow piece of shit by today's standards. It's nice that so many have been able to sit on similar rigs for this long, but it's time to move on. That kind of service life in commodity-level PCs was almost unheard of a decade ago. Upgrades are a part of life in the tech business, and I don't think it's fair to bitch this time just because you got a little extra mileage out of the last round.
The masses of now-unsupported XP users reflects badly on the users, not Microsoft. If you missed the boat on a Windows 7 upgrade, it's your own damn fault. On the upside, the ensuing clusterfucks at various large enterprises should teach yet another hard lesson about the perils of under-funding your IT department.
Nice plug, by the way, though it's amusing that "Futurepower" is so willing to cling to the past.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
I think that any organization still using XP has failed an IT test. This does not mean that the IT people suck but that some aspect of IT sucks. It could be that the IT people can't proactively spend money to avoid expenses such as this and can only spend money when they have to. This is broken. I wouldn't be surprised if some dolts in these organizations are now saying that the budget to upgrade from XP has been eaten by these licensing costs.
What I have seen before is that some minor OS upgrade comes along and the various parties say, "Hey we need a minor upgrade to our software to keep up." this is then refused so after the next OS update they say, "He we pretty desperately need a medium sized upgrade to catch up." this is refused. This goes on and on until basically they are screaming, "We MUST upgrade now and the upgrade is a major overhaul of how everything works." then the worst thing in the world happens, they agree. The problem being that some sleazy mega-sized consulting company comes in and starts throwing around "best-practices" and $50 million later a completely useless system that is actually far worse than the 12 year old pile of crap they have is born. Then another $50 million is spent getting it to barely work.
The probable cost to have had a continuous stream of upgrades in the first place? Maybe $500,000 per year.
Nice fairy tale. The IRS had their budget cut and the chances of being audited is the lowest it has been in years, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/....
Now, you probably think this is a good thing, except that the sainted American people will do anything to cheat on their taxes. Whether you like it or not, much of higher and lower education rely on taxes, as does most fundamental research. But Congress has been cutting that as well because research grows on trees, right.
And the problem isn't with the IRS, it is with the tax code. Congresses and Presidents have written that. The last simplification happened because Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan agreed to simplify it and rammed it through Congress, although it took them several years. The current crop of congresscritters cannot agree on where the sun rises, good luck in simplification.