It cost this country *millions* to get all their software working and tested during the last change in the Bush era. I personally had to manage my company's conversion and testing, as we had to work with 3 versions of Windows, 2 versions of SunOS, 2 versions of Java to keep up with, 3 JDBC drivers, plus 2 versions of Oracle, each being patched every week in the lead-in as each had to determine if the other wasn't adapted/patched and had to work around it.
$150,000 for a simple 150 employee company to assign 5 people in development, QA, and IT, to keep up with it all for 2 months and hope like hell everything worked on the other side. And during all that time, none of the 5 of us could do stuff that really benefited our company and its product line.
Multiply that by every single small company, nevermind the huge companies like Microsoft and Oracle that had to eat all that cost of writing all those patches in the first place, and you get a wasted dollar figure so large that retail sales going up by 2% will NEVER make up for. We will never get that money back - the stock market slumped for a month in recovery.
And you want us to go through that again?
No offense, Mr. Johnson, but go to hell. I am not going through that again...