"Walk into your local government office, bank and airline and the probability is that they’ll be using XP."
Thats for other reasons
Last year I was part of a major rollout of new laptops to the Dept of Work & Pensions. I was in a team building the software loads on thousands of new machines,
We had to downgrade these machines from 64-bit Win7 to 32-bit XP Pro. Why? Quite simply because the DWP runs a number of small-user legacy databases which will not work in Win7, even under compatibility mode. One at least is 16-bit DOS mode and the DWP will not pay to upgrade these. This has created a situation in that the needs of a small minority of users has prevented the whole estate from upgrading by a few bits of software used by less than 5% of the staff.
I was told that a knock-on effect was that the MOD could not get a much needed upgrade to one program (stock control??) because the DWP were the lead customer and refused the expense.
This situation has an even bigger problem in that these legacy software systems also required us to install legacy versions of other programs - some had to have Office 2003, and ancient version of Adobe Acrobat - with all the security risks that brings
The users, and the IT team wanted the upgrade. Cost cutting management who declined to understand the risks refused it
Last edited by Milo Minderbinder; 5th July 2012 at 00:01.