While I agree with your basic point from the point of view of the users who have "shiney" at home and "rubbish" at work I'm still not too clear on what is wrong with Win XP and Office 2003 (for a Microsoft house). For your basic user who sends emails, writes word docs and pushes numbers arround in Excel what part of their job is suddenly a lot easier in Win7 / Office 2010? There are several improvements but nothing groundbreaking and when you compare the cost of new desktops against tight cash in the modern economy does the performance increase of giving 40 people new computers compare against a whole persons wage for a year? Maybe, maybe not depending on your circumstances.

Shiney new toys can have their uses (iPads look very good in presentations and might swing a few extra sales, smartphones can be great for people on the road to respond to emails quickly rather than waiting until they return to base and turn on their laptop etc) but generally end users will always want shiney - sometimes because its actually a much better idea, sometimes because its shiney and the person next to them has it. The tricky task for IT is to decide which is which and try to encourage that way.

Hopefully pretty soon we will move away from using passwords to something else like one of those RSA key fobs and OpenID. Then people can remember a single password which combined with the dual factor makes a very strong proof of identity. OpenID gives you the same login everywhere which removes the other issue with secure passwords and trying to remember all of them, After all its better to trust a company that bases its business of dual factor authentication than a pile of post-it notes stuck to your monitor. They will take securing their servers seriously. Oh wait....

Probably no point in having it work on XP itself from a corporate point of view - anyone with the authority to order replacement of all WinXP machines in a company will likely already have Windows 7 on their nice powerful new computer. Typically I'd also have expected the IT departments to have a good portion of Windows 7 machines as they will need to gain experience in it to support anyone in the rest of the company using windows 7. All the little "Go to control panel, add remove programs... what do you mean its not there?" issues which you need to be familiar with.

Or someone who has to follow rules like PCI DSS which requires you to change passwords at least every 90 days, be at least 7 char long, include numeric and alphabetic char, not be the same as any of the previous 4 passwords, auto lockout after 6 attempts for at least 30 minutes etc. Don't like that rule and the card companies don't want you handling card payments which makes business a bit hard.

Personally I'd prefer the option of teaching people to use a decent password and not change/share it but we do not have that option. As it is its a constant battle* with users forgetting their new password, using someone elses, writing it down so they remember it etc. Rapid complex password changes are viewed by many users as a problem which they try to workarround in order to get their job done.

* A battle we have pretty much won but needs constant vigilance to keep it that way which makes the IT people the bad guys.

I sure hope IPv4 does fade out. Setting up firewall rules for example requires concentration and checking (AKA time). If I need to set up one set of IPv6 rules and another set of IPv4 rules (with this old thing called NAT which can get confused when the other end is also using NAT) then it has just doubled the time required and probably increased the chances of me making a mistake and being vulnerable on one or the other versions. Once IPv6 is widely used there will be no benefit to hosting content on IPv4 and people will stop bothering.

Unfortunatly the problem is getting IPv6 "widely used" when every site currently supports IPv4. Until there are sites only on IPv6 there is no big benefit for anyone to upgrade their systems/service/settings to IPv6 however until almost everyone is on IPv6 content providers will still provide an IPv4 address. Until this is sorted both IPv4 and IPv6 can work well side by side just like most other new technologies - people did not throw out all their floppies the day that CD's became available.

Without a connection to the internet it would be harder to get software updates & virus protection updates. Do you think it would be more secure running WinXP SP1 and no internet connection? Fine until someone brings a memory stick or CD with a new set of settings for the centrifuge...

Oh yes, I can change my IP ranges to 192.168.2.x. Only two problems with this:

Firstly I manage about 15 servers with static IP's - changing all those IP address is not easy especially when you add in the firewall rules etc.

Secondly there is nothing stopping the next company I connect to using 192.168.2.x themselves. Or 192.168.1.x/24. By using an obscure 10.a.b.c subnet this is still potentially a problem but far less likely.

I use 10.a.b.c because almost nobody else uses it! When trying to create VPN tunnels to one of the several other companies I have to connect to I got fed up with them saying "Oh but we use 192.168.1.something for our [servers | LAN | DMZ ] etc. Can't you use something else?" By choosing an obscure 10. subnet for my network I have avoided these problems and can setup firewall to firewall VPN tunnels to the people supporting our database, phone system, network support, etc without worrying about routing.

Sorry Tom, you are 25 years old. Most people don't get to be IT managers until their mid-30s.

On the other hand I'm an IT manager at 27. Working at a company of 50 people with only 2 IT people I still get a decent share of the technical challenges, but also get to deal with the "bigger picture" stuff. So far it has been very rewarding and challenging, although it is tricky to ballance the priorities of running the department with fixing the systems. Its always easy to ignore the bits of management you don't want to do and deal with the technical stuff but that way lies a badly run department and big problems.

The main thing I have enjoyed about IT is the variety of technical challenges. Working in a small company you still get that.