The Life and Death of Microsoft Software 187
coondoggie writes "With Microsoft aiming to release Vista real soon now, they've been retiring older versions of the Windows OS. For IT outfits it's yet again time to evaluate what stays and what goes, and make plans for the future. Network World discusses the life cycle of Microsoft's software." From the article: "'Generally, it is a bad idea to run unsupported software, but there can be a business case to run it,' says Cary Shufelt, Windows infrastructure architect at Oregon State University, in Corvallis. The university still has some NT machines running in isolation in its labs. But Shufelt says there are security risks in allowing connections to legacy machines and that the university makes sure to minimize those risks. 'We don't allow [Windows] 9.x clients to connect to our Active Directory,' he says. 'But we try to stay current with technology so these issues don't typically come up.' Others say they also stay current to avoid headaches and fire drills."
hmmm... (Score:1, Interesting)
What reasoning is that? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I predict a quick death for XP after release of (Score:3, Interesting)
It may not 'look' that much different, but has as many differences as NT4 to Win2k did.
I find articles like the one posted quite suspect. Legacy hardware can easily run WinXP as well, and there is Virtual PC for the hard core legacy apps that can be tightly wrapped in the new OSes security...
Point of Sale Systems (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that alot of companies at this point may actually decide to replace these systems with Linux based POS to save money and as a result of that, they will see the benefit of using Linux elsewhere as well. The big issue will be that these companies will have to upgrade all their terminals and hardware as well as all their software and potentially, if they just switched to Linux and a Open Source POS system, they could save MILLIONS.
Feel free to insert opinions here. I'm interested how others think corporate America will respond.
Re:The risk is not just direct (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider the following scenarios - all fictional, but all perfectly conceivable in any sizeable organisation:
Re:Brings up the question (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:stupid comentary (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost everything under the sun (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Complicated Case to Spend Money (Score:2, Interesting)
Introducing planned obsolescence into your comment(are any machines....) sidesteps the career limiting risks a system administrator faces when her PHB wants a shiny new software application.
Diverting attention away from Microsoft's security woes by throwing up backward compatibility is a fallacy.
The big reason microsoft gets into security trouble is the organization has no incentive to provide more security. It's a business: Selling first, security second. I'm glad the situation is so bad because it keeps me gainfully employed.
Finally, *right now* backward compatibility is totally irrelevant to Microsoft.
Re:The risk is not just direct (Score:3, Interesting)
The situation we have today with software - even open source software - is that even if you have the source code it is not feasible for the average joe to attempt to "maintain" it in any way. Today a moderate size software project may have 200,000 lines of code and not all of it written to be clearly understood by someone outside the project. You are looking at a huge learning curve to be able to get to the point where you could even begin to intelligently track down bugs.
If there was no other choice at all, it might be worth making that kind of investment. But, it would require making that investment over and over again due to staff turnover and such. And the rule of off-the-shelf software is there is always another choice. Most commercial IT establishments have figured this out - if some application is discontinued you choose another one. Generally just as cheap and has whatever small subset of functionality that you really need.
Back in the 1970's companies actually did pay in-house staff to write things like word processing applications, accounting programs and the like. The focus in the last 20 years or so has been to eliminate that kind of staff dependency and just buy solutions.
I'm not sure open source helps in that environment at all.