Same in healthcare. Most the custom apps we spent upwards of $10,000 for, do EXACTLY what they were intended to do ten years ago....and most of them run in a DOS box no matter WHAT OS you have shoehorned under the desk. Change for the sake of change is silly when it generates frustration, costs a whole bunch of money and causes downtime for no apparent benefit. Most of our upgrades are driven by something becoming obsolete to the point you can't get it anymore. We only started rolling out of 98se and into XPpro around two years ago, because we were not only faced with not building new (legal) 98se boxes, but IE6 was pretty much not going to keep up with new threats.
XP and IE7 presented a whole new interface to accomplish pretty much the same thing we have been doing for ten years. The AMD 4Ghz chips and 2gigs of DDR400 are about two years behind "bleeding edge"....but RIDICULOSLY fast to run our little Pacware and Angoss Smartware apps, all custom written either for us or by us, to do the same thing we did on P233 machines with 64megs of SDRAMM, EDO or whatever. About the only thing even REMOTELY modern that has happened is that PacWare is just starting to rollout a "PacWin" version. Same proggy.....slower, prettier and buggy, and it runs in 98 as well.
Early adopting makes no sense at all for a business in the business of making money, unless downtime, retooling, inservices and general frustration with the new GUI are going to pay off in some way.
Funny this should come up, because I was just this morning at Wawanesa (car insurance), and recognised the wav files from an old OS2-Warp machine coming up. Turns out they have been doing the required hardware upgrades so she could sit behind a shiny new box and an uncluttered desk with an LCD monitor and optical mouse, but they somehow managed to go about 15 years or whenever with OS2-Warp and their custom applications for running that place. The app is apparently updated to keep up with new data entry fields and whatnot, but still opens a command box to run and do its thing. Now THATS a company still making money on something about 20 years old !!
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Same in healthcare. Most the custom apps we spent upwards of $10,000 for, do EXACTLY what they were intended to do ten years ago....and most of them run in a DOS box no matter WHAT OS you have shoehorned under the desk. Change for the sake of change is silly when it generates frustration, costs a whole bunch of money and causes downtime for no apparent benefit. Most of our upgrades are driven by something becoming obsolete to the point you can't get it anymore. We only started rolling out of 98se and into XPpro around two years ago, because we were not only faced with not building new (legal) 98se boxes, but IE6 was pretty much not going to keep up with new threats.
XP and IE7 presented a whole new interface to accomplish pretty much the same thing we have been doing for ten years. The AMD 4Ghz chips and 2gigs of DDR400 are about two years behind "bleeding edge"....but RIDICULOSLY fast to run our little Pacware and Angoss Smartware apps, all custom written either for us or by us, to do the same thing we did on P233 machines with 64megs of SDRAMM, EDO or whatever. About the only thing even REMOTELY modern that has happened is that PacWare is just starting to rollout a "PacWin" version. Same proggy.....slower, prettier and buggy, and it runs in 98 as well.
Early adopting makes no sense at all for a business in the business of making money, unless downtime, retooling, inservices and general frustration with the new GUI are going to pay off in some way.
Funny this should come up, because I was just this morning at Wawanesa (car insurance), and recognised the wav files from an old OS2-Warp machine coming up. Turns out they have been doing the required hardware upgrades so she could sit behind a shiny new box and an uncluttered desk with an LCD monitor and optical mouse, but they somehow managed to go about 15 years or whenever with OS2-Warp and their custom applications for running that place. The app is apparently updated to keep up with new data entry fields and whatnot, but still opens a command box to run and do its thing. Now THATS a company still making money on something about 20 years old !!