On 2/5/10 8:50 AM, SteveCraft wrote:
There's also something to be said for personnel knowing a "mature" system for security. I worked for Sungard Availability Services where certain systems/etc have to have 99.999% uptime. So in 2007 they had WinXP (from 2002) systems with IE 6 all patched up with other layered security parts throughout the OSI stack because their XP config had been tested/validated for several years. I'd bet money they won't go to Vista or Windows 7 until 2012 at least, if that. It took them years to go from NT4 to XP...
The problem with the "It works, why change it." system is that change isn't always predictable. It's predictable there will be change (although, not by everyone) but when is the big question.
A place I worked at had three different computer based systems all using IBM PS/2 systems. We'd been using the same model for several years. When finally we found out they were going away we (I) started shopping for a new computer. I was only doing it for one of the products but the others said "we'll use what you pick".
So I went and found something and it worked well. Well almost but that's another story. But one of the other products that controlled some machinery used lots of software timing loops to control things. Everyone admitted that was bad but no one would make the call to fix it. Their solution was to replace all the PS/2 systems in the field with the new computer and change all the timing loops accordingly. I did point out that next year we might / should plan on a different computer. It would certainly be faster and would break those software timing loops again. What where they going to do, replace all the computers in the field AGAIN. I don't know, I was gone by then. I'm sure they made it work and I'm sure they did just the minimum to do so.
If there is anything the computer industry is good at, it's change. Yet so many people get caught by surprise when it happens... again... and again.
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