Should we laugh or cry? Government pays Microsoft £5.5m to extend Windows XP support
 

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Government pays Microsoft £5.5m to extend Windows XP support - Telegraph

Cry !!!!!!!!

So they are just spending all this money to put off for up to 12 months that which should have been planned for and completed already.

What is truly ironic is that the same departments are all paying for software maintenance with MS through their volume agreements that entitle them to upgrade to the most up-to-date Windows versions at no additional software licence cost.

Of course, that doesn't take into consideration the cost of performing the migration, training and any hardware upgrades.

As an aside, I wonder how easy it will be for the security updates to find their way onto PCs that fall outside "central and local government, charities, schools and the NHS".

SD

a little birdy whispered to me that the vast majority of the worlds cashpoint (ATMs) are still running XP................. & that 29% of the estimated population of working PCs are also still running XP.

In the words of Fraser, we're doomed!

Rans6.......

If the UK state bodies are spending that on MS support, they must be confident that their AV support for XP will continue also. Or will they have to pay for that also? Or maybe they will all move to MS Security Essentials?

SD

Sounds to me like £5.5m worth of snake oil.

Discalcula Rules C.J
 

Looking at rhe Article:

"The agreement is worth £5.548 million, and covers 'critical' and 'important' security updates for Windows XP, as well as Office 2003 and Exchange 2003, which also go out of support next Tuesday "

Taken from the Daily Telegraph Article published on their website 3/4/2014 - I have no connection with the Telegraph.

Weep my Child / and anyone else, weep.

"......Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury...."

Act 5, Macbeth Scenes 1-onward

Anyone who has worked in an area of Government understands the lack of insight at work here...

CAT III

I was idly looking at the NASA feed from the ISS the other day and noticed a couple of laptops showing the XP screen saver. Should someone send them a W7 DVD and a fistfull of licences?

With this news we must all hope and pray that 'mixture' doesn't work for the public sector in the UK

Re Mixture
 

I suspect that his handle, not his Handel, excluding his musical potential tastes (unlike CAT III) lends a clue to his/her past.

Stopit, Stopit, CAT III ... You are baiting your own kind (perhaps)

Edit: [Cut the contributor some slack - Been there, they work hard often without clear results for months]

More seriously. Working in the front line of IT is a B*****d of a way to earn a living. (No Sun Shades)

I would rather be a Pilot.

CAT III

I saw somewhere that ISS was moving to Ubuntu.

Laughter tbrough tears - Oy va voy.

This failing to update software and then paying to extend the maintenance contract reminds me of when at work footings were poured for a large satellite dish in the one place where the view of the Meteosat spacecraft was obscured by a tree. Having bolted the legs into place and fitted the dish someone noticed the tree. A ladder and a boy with a handsaw were procured and the boy went up to cut the middle branches out of the tree.

Forward planning is everything.

Would any company other than the arrogant Micro$oft infuriate such a large number of clients by withdrawing support for their products? It's basic blackmail to demand £5.5M to maintain WinXP support, nothing less....

Not everyone, Saab Dastard can afford to scrap perfectly good PCs running Win XP. Win8 is an abysmal piece of junk which is being forced on PC users by Micro$oft as it's difficult to buy a new PC with Win7 these days.

As a compromise, M$ should acknoweldge the failure of Win8 and continue to support legacy OS until they've woken up to the fact that not all PC users are spotty geeks playing games with each other, or hippy-village 'cloud' :yuk: users obsessed with social meeja. And which business users want touchscreen laptops?

M$' attempt to persuade people to persuade others to ditch XP in favour of 8 was greeted with ridicule and disdain; regrettably, the company has such a large market position that it feels it can do as it pleases and to hell with the consequences.

You are talking utter bull old chum ! :ugh:

Sale of new licenses ceased starting June 2008. End of Life announcement came 14th April 2009. Which means people have had 5 years of free extended support from Microsoft and a total of 6 years to make the change.

People have had more than enough time to migrate .... either to newer versions of Windows or to Mac or Linux.

No home user or SME can justify staying with XP, everything they do can be done perfectly well on newer platforms. Only larger businesses with specific circumstances can justify staying XP until they update all relevant systems.... the XP extended maintenance fees are charged per device and therefore it encourages businesses to migrate all devices as soon as possible. The reason it cost the government so much is because of the sheer number of XP machines left within their IT estate and the backlog they've faced in migrating them.

The time has come. Stop clutching at non-existent straws..... move on. All versions of all software products cannot be supported forever ... even if you have the deep pockets of Microsoft.

I reckon there is big meetings going on seeing if they can rollout Linux on the desktop.

If one country's public service go that way then the rest will follow. This whole thing could be a major backfire to M$.

Maybe you can have a word with your friend Mr Salmond ... (the original mad_jock :cool:) ... he seems the sort who would roll out on a Linux on a whim irrespective of the consequences.

On a more serious note, haven't bits of Germany already gone Linux ?

For the record
 

Ireland coughed up to them also, at least ye can print some money
We have to beg Angela!

the walrus will be one of many that will be looking at it if he even knows what it is, I suspect he is a mac user anyway.

UK I think has gone open Office already or is in the process of rolling it out.

Germany Linux is much more in use anyway and has been for years.

There were quite a few 1000 plus workstation sparc networks when I worked over there over 10 years ago.

I wouldn't be surprised if they go the whole hog.

Also wouldn't be surprised if a workstation Linux desktop comes, with windows only apps on terminal servers as a solution. From a support point of view it would mean you could dump 50% of your low level support staff and not have to worry about huge rollouts every 5 years never mind the savings in licensing.

Your talking 100's of millions of savings in the UK alone over 2-3 years.

Oh and atms are xp but they didn't used to be linked to tcp/ip. They have there own protocol and had there own form of banking internet through the telephone exchanges using that protocol.

Well that was the case when i was in the game. It might have changed its been a while.