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.

Don't forget that with a Windoze upgrade will probably require a hardware upgrade too, which is more costly than the WinXP upgrade itself.

As almost all manufacturing in the Western world has been outsourced guess which country is poised to reek the benefits of any massive hardware rollout. Worse still, the existing hardware although old still works fine (provided you are not running the latest bloatware from MS like SCOM).

The smarter choice for the government (and the tax payer) would be to flick their WinXP over to Linux. There are plenty of terminal services, emulation, virtual solutions around on the Linux platform to allow access to legacy Windows systems if required.

Alternatively government could set up their own private cloud like GoogleDocs in which case only a browser is required, but this could be a bit early days for that approach, at least they could start planning towards it.

Though I'm a big Linux fan, and use that myself, its more than a hinderance than a savior for most of the world.

To understand this you need to understand the average plebe/user. After seeing various departments try to implement it, then abandon it, its a waste of time for most. The world works on windows and office, project etc as a whole (statisticaly).

When you have companys that only let you work in particular formats you know your stuffed. Products like open office and Libreoffice have come a long way, but still can't keep up with microsoft changes.

In fact I'm working on a document right now that must be in docx, and submitted in docx format. Though Libre office does a good job of opening it, its not quiet right. So solution, get someone to save it in doc format, I do what I have to, and then get mate to save it as docx format and then submit it to the F$#%ers who want it that way.

Anyone who wants to role out Linux department wide either gets some half backed sod to do it. Its not quite right and then they leave and no F#$%ker can fix it. Or they get some other proffesional mob to do it, and their beholden to them anyway.

The good thing about windows is, almost any dumb f%^k can come in and do support. As long as they have done the courses.

rh200 I don't disagree.

But just like that ISO 9000 rubbish its just a matter of what the spenders of money want.

If you want to do work with a public entity you will have to provide the documentation using a package they dictate. Be it docx x or the open office format.

And to be honest with the big unix networks I used to be involved with most new users had never seen a solaris workstation before. But they managed usually without to much problems to be honest including the admin staff.

The public accountants won't care that it will cause the workers grief doing there jobs. They will just like that there are big numbers with loads of zero's at the end getting removed from the balance sheet and they don't have to look for other things to cut back on.

A unix/Linux rollout is a completely different beast to a windows one. Say a 2000 unit rollout. Windows ones used to take a couple of weeks just pulling in the range of hardware you had and making the plan, then a week to build the rollout and test it. While 2-3 were doing that the apps boys were making the deployment packages. Then you would need a team out rolling it out and then another team floor walking getting everyone setup. So all in you would need 5-6 techies, 5-6 low grade grunts on the floor, and 2-3 Floor walkers. You used to be able to roll out 100 a night if you brought them into a build room did the hardware then built them and deployed them again. If you went for on desk build it was always hit and miss that it would have finished by the time people started appearing in the morning.

Unix rollout all it took was 3 of us and to be honest you could have done it with one. Everything was scripted. Everone got booted out Friday at 8pm with a cron job and the rollout started 2000 units finished by Sat morning 12 hours later. 3 root admins doing first line support on Monday morning and by lunch time no more calls. And most of the calls taken weren't actually about anything to do with the rollout. Also when there was a problem it was globally fixed by either a server change or a global change to the user dot files on the server.

First time I did one after 5-6 windows rollouts I was gob smacked

1. How easy it was.
2. The lack of fannying around the next working day.
3. It just worked with hours apon hours of meetings discussing deployment plans licensing numbers and all that rubbish completely gone.

Lets face it if the machine has got XP hardware on it all the current Linux distributions your not even going to have to check the hardware levels and find wanky drivers. Once the rollout is built and servers are ready it just going to be 10 bods running round the offices with 5 usb sticks each. With a clone back up server locally attached to the subnet. Workers come in and go to the class room for 4 hours when they get back its all done and they are running.

Once you have done the initial conversion rollout nobody needs to go near the machines. When the user logs on after a rollout after that they will just get kicked into a CBT package if its required.

Unix wise we had 4 admins for 1800 workstations and 3200 users and we also helped out with the Microsoft side of things. They had 1100 workstations and had a support guy for every 150 users which is actually a bit false because they only really had 900 only PC users. And everything apart from the exchange server was provided by a unix server.

So even through if may not be what people want there is just to much money to be saved.

And once the default document required by public works departments becomes openoffice then all the suppliers will use it and there will be a cascade away from office even if it is better.

A good post on the Torygraph's site:

Hear, hear! With over a 25% market share, why alienate users of 450 million PCs for no other reason than pure M$ greed?

I suspect they will back track they know what will happen if they don't.

But it won't be free.

How much do you recon ongoing support should cost? How much does it cost to continue to support it.

It's not just greed BEagle it does actually take quite a lot of resources to do it properly.

You wouldn't expect ongoing OEM support on a airframe for free would you?

Well, I'd be happy to pay for ongoing support, for about the same cost as my annual anti-virus support.

Now there's a business opportunity for people like Trend Micro / Symantec / Macafee - offer bundled anti-virus and continued XP support to normal users - assuming M$ would play ball, of course.

Not terribly environmentally friendly to expect 450 million serviceable PCs to be thown away...:=

Don't feed the troll mad_jock. He evidently hasn't done a day's work in the IT industry and has no idea about the realities of software development and maintenance. :cool:

To be honest they wouldn't have the skill set to support the OS.

This issue and how it pans out may have quiet reaching effects for M$.

They could go for a 5 year license and the machine stops working you pay for what you get which is 5 years and then you get what you were told you were getting.

Or you pay by the year.

But both of these solutions will hit quite hard there market share as they are finding with the cloud solutions, consumers are just not happy with it.

They really aren't saying junk the machines just that they aren't going to fix it any more.

Apart from the PR M$ won't care what you do. The admin's of the world do care though because they know what the potential **** storm may occur if something nasty comes out. Even if they have done all the right things there is potential for their networks and services to be brought down through no fault of theirs.

Yup.... DDoS and reflection attacks galore... all due to the zombies that will be made out of XP machines owned by the clinger-ons of this world.

Its not a case of "if"... but "when"....

He isn't a troll, he is a well respected ex officer in the royal airforce.

Never met the bloke but we have common mates.

What he is though is a normal consumer of IT products. He has a computer in front of him that works and he is more than happy with. But then people are telling him he needs to junk it at his own personal expense. He is not alone in his views. In fact there will be more people out there with his views than yours.

I see both sides of the wall so to speak. I see it as a ex network, UNix and PC server admin. And I also see it as a high end user of pc hardware for engineering design.

I also see it from the POV of an airline captain who gets IT crap dumped on his plate to sort out at work because I can sort it out. I also see that there is limited resources. Do we get in an all singing and dancing IT solution which puts us in the red and means that we can't keep our AOG stores full so we can continue to earn money flying or do I make things work the best I can and the planes stay in the air and we all get paid at the end of the month.

What the IT industry wants users to do will never happen, they won't come away from XP for exactly the reasons why BEagle is pissed off. To think otherwise is just pure stupidity. Now what the industry does to deal with this issue is up to them.

The problem won't go away by those in the know calling people names on the internet. You just have to accept the fact its not going to happen the way you want it and deal with what ever happens.

Wasn't calling him names by any means..... was using the term troll in the more generic term in so far as someone wishing to incite specific responses by way of posting hardline statements in a desperate attempt to gain support for a wildly incorrect point of view.

Had Beagle not spent his last few posts on this thread harking on about how its all about Microsoft greed then he may well have elicited a different response. Much the same way as he would get pissed off if I went round telling his ex-employer (RAF) how to do things, I think he too should be a little more careful about spouting nonsense about a topic he evidently knows next to nothing about. Or maybe if Beagle was running the RAF they would still be flying Spitfires and other legacy equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq because you can't ever phase it out, and there's nothing wrong with Spitfires in modern warfare ..... its all about the greed of the fighter manufacturers you know !

As you well know, he may also not necessarily need to junk his PC, but he does need to junk XP and that is not exactly going to break the bank is it for a Windows 7 or 8 license ? :ugh:

He may well not be alone in his views, but that's no reason for those with more technical knowledge than the average Joe to correct them.... just politely sitting back and accepting that nonsense as an acceptable "alternative view" is just plain wrong. There is no debate to be had on the matter of XP, the technical evidence is 100% on the side of dumping XP .... therefore where the opportunity arises consumers need to be educated. Had Beagle written his views in another tone, he might have got a different form of response from me than what he has because of his one-man anti-microsoft war he's chosen to fight.

It might not be correct in your view but it is the view of a vast majority of normal IT users.

Even upgrading the OS if the hardware is good is a major pain in the tits for most personal users.

They aren't in a controlled environment which means all the tech issues are taken care of. They have bits an bobs everywhere, software that they don't have the installation disks for and the bit of paper with the license code on it has be gone for years.

Its a major pain in the backside for them and that's not even going down the line of if they have better uses for the cash how ever little it is.

They have a machine in front of them that works, they are happy with it.

The reason why they haven't moved to anything newer than XP is because the newer stuff is nothing special, win8 is crap the evolution of OS development has levelled off. The vendors now need to change their business models or they will go out of business.

Oh and just to add 5.5 million is peanuts.

Last local authority rollout I did for Y2K was 1.8 million and that was only the authority offices, social works department and fire brigade.

Even if they paid that for the next 10 years it wouldn't even cover a quarter of the cost of rolling out the whole country. You wouldn't even be able to do one NHS health board for 5.5 million.

Nah mad_jock. Lots of ATM's still run XP, and a lot still run os/2. A lot now use the www for connectivity, SSL and web services. I was browsing off a popular cash machine couple of days ago just to show it was possible!! Pretty sad eh?

What "in your view" nonsense ! Its not correct full stop. Unsupported, untrustworthy OS with associated unsupported and untrustworthy APIs ... there is absolutely nothing you can do to secure it other than taking it off the internet permanently.

I also don't care much for the point of view given by Beagle, or your suggestions that it's a pain in the backside because they can't find their install disks for software or whatever..... Microsoft have given people like them six years notice to get their act together.... so to come on here talking as if Microsoft suddenly did this on a whim overnight is nothing but a joke !

If you don't wish to take the opportunity to educate users, taking the opportunity to show/explain that moving off XP is not such a big deal, then fine.... but you're merely hoisting yourself by your own petard and leaving the poor IT admins to clean up the dog mess you've left behind.

I appreciate that because he's your friend you may opt to wear the rose-tinted spectacles when talking to him about XP, but there's no reason to try to force others from speaking the truth about XP.

No as I have said I have never met him.

I would stick up for anyone else that came along with similar views.

Like it or not this is a complete cluster :mad:


It has the potential to put a whole heap of PC support guys out of a job.
It has the potential to change the whole market place in a way that apple can only dream of.

If I was a grunt level pc server admin or 1st or 2nd line support engineer I would be extremely worried and be looking at getting my unix/Linux skills up pretty sharpish.

The users won't dump XP like it or not. And to be honest I completely see the reasons why they aren't.

The point is that if a large organisation such as the UK government suddenly switched to Linux and insisted on ODF as its preferred format, the requirement to use docx would reduce. uk.gov did a big consultation earlier this year, it was easy to spot the responses from those with a vested interest in continuing the MS lock-in.

Where Windows scores highly is in the ability to lock down a machine and impose (and then vary) a central group policy. Linux developers dropped the ball on that one, which is part of the reason why MS has maintained such a stranglehold on the desktop. Linux can undoubtedly achieve much of the same control, but it's still in pieces.

I disagree, SELinux has very good policy control, even Solaris had one way back, there are admins out there who are specialists in setting up compliance and security management systems, some of them even know how to do both Windows an *nix :).

I see it all going SaaS because most large organisations now store all their crud in some content management system, e.g Documentum :yuk:.

mad_jock, thank you for putting the case for the normal user, like myself, who is being held to ransome by M$' arrogance and their intent to abandon >25% of the PC market share to its own fate....

The IT 'industry', in general, completely fails to address users' interests in its ceaseless attempts to invent something which many of us simply do NOT need - such as 'Cloud' computing.... It also has a stunningly breathtaking arrogance.

I've been keeping in touch with Win8 news and conclude it is an absolute disaster. Win8.1 is a sticking plaster which doesn't solve things properly and now we hear that Win8.2 / Win9 is on the way, so will obviously wait to see whether M$ has listened. If upgrading was as user-friendly as moving from Win95 to WinXP (perhaps before you were born, mixture?), there would be fewer complaints. But to 'upgrade' from WinXP Pro to that Win8 piece of junk which seems to be the only High St. computer shop's option....?? Perhaps you can see why people aren't bothering to do so.

As for renting software and needing high speed broadband to access it, just what planet are M$ on?? The dismal 'Windows Live Mail' was supposed to replace Outlook Express and failed to do so, alienating yet more customers who then had to buy Office or move to another e-mail client. Another M$ own goal.

Back in the days of WinXP, IE8, Outlook Express, M$ was a respected company which met customer needs very clearly. But since 'Vista', they've listened to too many IT geeks and not enough normal people, in my view. They are now using their dominant market position to the detriment of a significant number of previously very loyal customers - and that is clearly wrong!

(In my hotel room being bombarded with M$ 'cloud' adverts on BBC World news....:ugh:)

Absolutely, I'm now with Thunderbird - but I was quite happy with O.Express and wish I could still use it, but not only did it morph into W.Live Mail, but Microsoft hijacked the way I've sent pictures from Picasa, instead of just adding them to the body of the e-mail, it sent them to some "cloud" system and made them available for 3 months, and my correspondents had to"open" them, instead of just looking at them, as previously.

Absolutely - when I was forced into Windows H'eight I was fortunate to still have a Word 97 disc to put on my new machine - suits me fine, as it has done for over 15 years now.

I can accept that some people want "improvements", and good luck to them, make them available to those who do, but leave the rest of us alone, for us it ain't broke, so don't fix it.

I can tell you, when this Win H'eight machine dies, it will be Apple here I come.

Some need this instant contact, I don't, haven't even picked up an iPhone of a friend to even look at it yet and have absolutely no intention of ever buying one -tho' I appreciate that I might eventually be forced to by the "progress" Nazis.

Those who want it, go ahead, indulge yourselves, but those of us who don't are people too.

Same reasoning as our local clone of Tandy/Radio Shack have stopped providing bins of small electronic plugs and gadgets for the DiY home electronics / electrical amateur. Wanted a small, 2 pin 2 part plug yesterday, ( one that splits into male/female halves ) to connect my handheld radio to my headset, to use when flying my microlight, might have cost $2.oo a couple of years ago when there was plenty of choice, No way, said the assistant, no money in that sort of stuff, why don't you buy a $3,000 HDMI, Multi-pixel, 42" digital TV instead? ( or words to that effect )

No interest in selling what the public actually want, only in conning them into "upgrading" to something that they don't need and probably can't afford.

Microsoft ran two full pages of advertisements in today's Australian national newspaper encouraging / pleading with XP users to make the move to the vastly superior Windows 8.1. I've never seen any company do that before.

A bloke I know who has elected to stay with XP (yes I know - there are still a few ....) reported a unrequested popup ad a day or so back from MS urging him to invest in new hardware and (of course) Win 8.1.

They seem to be getting quite anxious, perhaps even somewhat desperate.

FOR

Disclaimer - reported without any claim or bias whatsoever, and purely in the interests of information and in the absolute spirit and ethic of PPRuNe. Nothing else. OK? :=