Greg,
Thank you for this synopsis. This is exactly what happened to my last
career job environment. We were basically built on Windows NT, and,
working just fine and dandy. M$ pushed us into doing our D.D. of Win2K
and a pre-peek at WinXP. The IT department was soon in cardiac arrest!
Simply because every internal department went to a "Do-Whatcha-Wanna-Do"
operation. We almost crashed!
The simple cost of conversion of all the "Back-Shop" business drove the
entire project to a major HALT! Yes, you can chide that we just never
"kept up with modern technology!" True. Why should we? We were doing
real business day-to-day and making lots of $$$. The bean-counter's
indicated what we had NOW was working fine. Which it was! In the end,
it took close to 4.5yrs to force the "move-ahead." My old corp-20 can
be a bit stogy!! LOL!
Best,
Duncan
Greg Sevart wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:hardware-
[email protected]] On Behalf Of swzaske
Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 9:10 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [H] firefox 3.5
There was a prominent news story several months back about a major
business being shown that Firefox is better than IE and the company
reps
responded that it was too expensive. After being told it was free they
still weren't interested in using it.
The product cost is quite frequently one of the least expensive components
of a major project such as this. A large corporation might have hundreds or
thousands of internal applications that must be tested for compatibility,
and you can bet that a large portion of those will simply not work properly,
necessitating either upgrading to a newer version (for purchased software)
or updating the code for internally developed applications. Many of those
might have teams that have been dissolved, and might require a complete
re-write, or outright replacement. You'll have other applications that you
simply can't replace that will lose functionality--for example, if you're an
Exchange shop, then Outlook Web Access reverts to the much less robust basic
mode when using a non-IE browser. (this is being addressed in Exchange
2010's OWA, however) Then there's support desk training, whole staff
training, and ongoing support. There's figuring out how to do updates (this
is one area where IE truly excels--Microsoft has spectacular tools in place
to centrally manage updates for pretty much every major application they
release), increased importance of in-house testing (it's unlikely that the
Mozilla organization performs nearly the same level of regression and
compatibility testing as Microsoft), and so on. I always find it amusing
when people simply look at the price of the product and make what seems to
be a one-point clear decision, without bothering to think through all of the
things that might be required for anything more than a home network.
