
Windows XP upgrade proves tricky business for John Lewis - ilghiro
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28790582
======
bellerocky
I don't feel bad for all those businesses that bought applications built with
ActiveX software and had to stick on Windows XP and IE6 forever.

A lot of that software had horrible UIs, causing severe stress for employees.
Imagine hand entering detailed orders where just the tiny wrong thing was off,
the wrong order, a typo in a SKU number, the wrong quantity would costs
thousands lost in shipping and product returns. The employee gets the blame
when that happens. No undo, no saving progress, no validation, no checking of
any kind, just HTML input boxes powered by ActiveX and the employee gets the
blame for things that could have been automated better.

You ever had your taxes done at H&R Block? They still use some ancient
software where you can't even copy and paste out of an input box. In 2014. On
a desktop.

I'm talking about PeopleSoft software and ugly, clunky and buggy software by
some local developer written in their garage at rock bottom prices for a
company that could have afforded more but just didn't care about what it was
putting its employees through. I'm glad they're having to pay through their
teeth now. It's companies like this that kept IE6 around so long.

~~~
tormeh
I agree. They could have written their software as multiplatform JVM apps or
whatever, but no - had to be OS-specific, unportable programs. They deserve
everything they get.

~~~
noselasd
Do also their customers deserve that ? They're the ones suffering and also
risk going out of business. There's a lot of businesses that are not tech
companies, but still need software to operate.

The people at such companies likely have no premise to judge whether the
software product is built on sustainable technology - they just care that it
does a fine job at operates their CNC mill or payroll system.

~~~
danelectro
If it's an electronic product, the customer rightly expects it to last as long
as other familiar electronic products.

If it's an expensive product then the customer rightly expects it to last much
longer than comparable items of lesser cost.

For a naturally expensive item like a CNC mill, where many customers will
purchase their first one to replace a manual mill which has worn out after a
decade or two, they often expect the modern CNC unit to fully replace the
older piece with no further consideration (or cost) until the same familiar
mode of mechanical wear occurs in another decade or two.

If your software or operating system does not live up to this expectation by
design, then you are not giving the customer what they need to begin with.

If an industrial solution truly solves a problem, it stays solved well enough
for the operator to move on to concentrate on their core competence (or
different unsolved problems) from then on, and only incur insignificant costs
or distractions from the previously unsolved problem.

A payroll or other office system is not that much different, but applies to
many more businesses. Computerizing a formerly manual system, high up-front
cost is expected to pay for itself in future efficiency. If no further
features are desired, then the business should be able to rely on electro-
mechanical integrity as the weakest point over the following decades.
Replacing individual worn-out office machines as needed in the traditional
way. Only "modernizing" company-wide on their own initiative and schedule. If
you can not buy brand new machines as needed to continue your present office
systems unchanged indefinitely if you want to, this does not mean there is a
defect in your approach just because you need a solved problem to stay solved.

You may just be a victim of a consumer-centric (predatory) IT vendor structure
even though you are paying top dollar for business solutions which are
supposed to last.

~~~
tormeh
That's a very different kind of product, though. CNC mill, yes, but internet-
connected-something? No. Things that will never be updated and never networked
yet must be reliable exists, but are not usually traditional enterprise stuff.

------
allegory
I've been on the arse end of an XP migration over the last couple of years. It
was an unmitigated disaster although the PR for the event says otherwise.

Typically a lot of the ActiveX vendors that were relied on to prop up the
browser functionality that had previously been migrated from IE5/Win2000 are
gone. There is no source code so the only result is to hire in contractors to
rewrite/replace functionality from scratch as a winforms app (as browsers
still can't do this sort of stuff, Silverlight is canned and the contractors
don't know WPF). This is not a bad thing but it has a cost.

Add to that, the server side, a completely insecure hodge-podge of ASP that
only worked on Windows 2003 and VB6 COM components. This needed scrapping and
starting again. Typically they did this with contractors who just about knew
ASP.Net web forms, some WCF and a bit of SQL so we're talking circa 2005-2008
tech for the rewrite.

Then there's the hardware which had 10baseT networks so the entire core
switches were replaced, all the cabling was replaced and the workstations were
all replaced, 25 servers were replaced, the network appliances were replaced
and a SAN was added.

Ten years down the line, a rewrite will be due and it will require porting to
Windows X (10) and all the tech will have changed again.

So £15.5m every decade for this platform + maintenance on top.

That's a lot of bottom line out of the window for a tech choice. At least with
other platforms, incremental change is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper
(Java EE / generic Unix).

~~~
VLM
"£15.5m every decade for this platform + maintenance on top."

Are you getting more than £2m/year net productivity gains? I'm guessing not,
unless this is over 10K people so the gains are a rounding error. Anyway thats
an interesting financial way to analyze it.

~~~
allegory
This is ~500 users so its shitty value and it cripples productivity because
it's terribly designed and put together. Probably a net loss of £4m IMHO.

Glad I don't work for them directly. We provide some software that integrates
with it.

------
dzhiurgis
> No more support means no more bug fixes or security patches - a situation
> that makes it much more vulnerable to attack by cyber thieves.

I always feel funny when I read lines like these. It's not like Windows XP
suddenly went from best-in-class, sound and secure system component into
something miserable. It kind of always was.

~~~
gnur
Of course it wasn't really secure ever, but whenever a serious security flaw
was discovered it could (and often would) be fixed with a week.

If one is discovered now, it will be exploitable forever.

~~~
valarauca1
Which is of course far better then the current model of windows exploits.

"Oh we fixed that in the next version already. Buy windows9 and you won't have
that problem."

Granted yes a lot of exploits are fixed via the patch system. But a surprising
number are just ignored.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Except that's not how it works. Microsoft has a hugely long support system set
up for a given version of Windows. That's why XP was supported for so long.

The only thing they ask you to do now is be sure you apply service packs...
their modern equivalent in this place (Windows 8.0 to 8.1). These are
completely free.

The only OS left out is Windows XP. Because it's 13 years old (next week) and
its end of life date has been known for YEARS.

------
lucb1e
> How did your Windows XP upgrade go?

About three weeks of frustration, but now I'd never want to go back. As a
developer, Linux is so much more flexible.

~~~
louhike
Is it just a troll or did you really upgrade from Windows XP to a Linux
distribution at your office recently?

~~~
lucb1e
No, not an entire office, but I do use Linux for work.

~~~
louhike
I'm asking because I'm interested in return on experience for this kind of
upgrades. We heard mostly of migrations for non-techies employees, not for
developers.

~~~
lucb1e
You should ask some developer companies, I think they'd have no problem
sharing this kind of information with non-competitors.

I can only say that it depends on the workspace and the tools that people are
used to. I've done internship in a place where the main components were done
with MSSQL and ASP.NET, there of course everyone is tied to Visual Studio and
used to the Windows workflow.

I've also done work where I was hired partly because of my Linux experience.
It was a pure development job (no infrastructure stuff) but it was still
useful to have.

All projects I do for myself, friends or family are done from Linux. Sometimes
have to use proprietary blobs like Teamviewer to support someone with Apple
Mail or something, but besides that I hardly ever touch anything non-free.

And finally for my study I also use Linux exclusively. First semester we had
some C# lessons and Mono just didn't cut it, and we got free Windows licenses
so I had no legal grounds to refuse on, but after that I hardly touched my
Windows VM.

Not sure all of this is useful info, but at least for myself I can do just
about everything with Linux (as long as no Microsoft components need to be
used like C#) and I guess you could also put a developer team on it. The two
issues I could imagine is support staff that needs extra training and whether
the software that you use to work in teams is also available for Linux. For
example MS Project is not something I've been able to find a replacement for,
but there might be html5 options (Trello?).

------
mpclark
I was surprised to see an XP box running on the desk in a doctor's consulting
room in Wales the other day. I thought it had gone away, but obviously not...

~~~
daigoba66
First rule of IT should be that nothing surprises you.

Many people treat computers as appliances that either work or don't work. Like
an expensive toaster.

~~~
danudey
I updated my video card drivers last night, which turned into a two-hour tech
support issue. The fans on my second video card stopped turning, the display
wasn't recognized. Wiped all my drivers out and reinstalled, still nothing.
Thought I'd burnt out my hardware somehow.

Come to find out that this version of the driver enables crossfire by default,
even if you had manually disabled it before (and previous versions had it
disabled by default). There's no indication that it's changed the setting
though, so it was just like 'hey, no monitor lol'. The best part was after I
turned it back off and got my second monitor back, a window popped up saying
'Hey your settings aren't optimized!' and suggested I turn crossfire on.

The lesson is: if you touch it it might break and you might have no idea why,
because some developer (or manager) made a stupid decision somewhere to change
a user's settings without asking them.

------
Sephiroth87
I wonder what would be more cost effective, freaking out and updating en masse
every 10 year, or keeping up and upgrading/rewriting old programs as time
go...

I'm thinking the second, but I might be wrong..

------
marktangotango
TL DR; John Lewis Partnership upgrades 26,000 desktops from Win XP to 7. They
had hundreds of applications, most worked, some didn't (80). Article says
these were some of the most critical systesm. Article talks about Windows UAC
as an impediment.

