Friday, March 02, 2007

US DOT bans Vista, IE7, Office 2007

Well, it seems the US Department of Transportation isn't eager to jump on the bandwagon and upgrade to Microsoft's latest products. Apparently the FAA has a similar ban going on.

Primary reasons cited include:
1) No compelling reason to upgrade
2) Possible compatibility issues (with existing software and with other gov't agencies)
3) Potential security risks.

I tend to agree with all of those reasons and honestly as I read through the feature list for Vista, I didn't see any compelling reason to upgrade either. Sure, it can be nice to be cutting edge and all...but when you do a major OS upgrade, you always have to deal with the delay in getting all your software fully compatible with the upgrade and the problems with security holes and bug fixes (I didn't jump on XP fully until well after SP1).

I don't know the market stats or anything, but if I had to guess, I would say that of all the Vista users currently, 89% are people who just bought a new PC and had no choice with another 10% being people in the computer industry who have to be cutting edge for their job and are just using it to provide for software/hardware upgrades, etc. I leave 1% for the people who are fish and figure they have to upgrade to keep their computer current.

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