Windows XP upgrade proves tricky business for John Lewis
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
What version of Peoplesoft are you talking about?
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.
Sorry, but we'll have to stick with "or something"
Absolutely, yes. Bad decisions put companies out of business every day. Bad technical decisions should be no different. Better luck next time.
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.
And honestly, paying extra in 1998 to have the contractor write a Java app to support multiple operating systems would have been a huge waste of money, since there weren't really any other platforms that businesses used (or at least, not these businesses).
The real 'they deserve everything they get' is that they didn't start this process sooner. The IT departments should have gotten their hands on the Vista DVD, tested their custom software, seen which way the wind was blowing, and started a project to modernize their systems. They could have spread the project (and cost) out over seven years, but instead they didn't start the process until it was too late to avoid huge expenses. It's exactly the same as people who didn't take Y2K seriously until September 1999, and then said 'Okay we need to update all of our things, can we have that done by November just to make sure?'
That reads like a catalogue of worst practices. It's possible to make Java apps really portable by doing absolutely nothing. You compile Java code to .class format, and then you are done. You would probably want to include your own JVM and a shortcut or bash file invoking it on the bytecode, but the point is it's actually more effort to make them non-portable.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership#Organisa...
Bad software certainly wasn't and isn't limited to activeX however. It is just bad software and can happen with a full web 2.0 singing and dancing website as any other. I've seen plenty of website dynamically load in content over other partially filled content without so much as a warning.
ActiveX gets a bad rap, but it's no worse than Java in a lot of context. The major downside is that it's Windows-only, but honestly so are a lot of Java apps (in practice, if not in design; e.g. native DLLs, OS assumptions), and in 2001 that wasn't really a huge issue for anyone.
Heck, there was a JNLP-installed call centre app that we used at a previous company (in 2009) which was technically a 'java' 'web' app but used Windows-native libraries and put them into the Program Files directory. If it could. Which it often couldn't. So if you weren't an administrator (so, for example, you were a call centre employee), it would 'install' but it wouldn't 'work'. Meaning that I, as the IT guy, had to go to every computer, log in as an admin, load the program, quit the program, and log out, on every computer.
So yeah, stupid mistakes aren't just limited to ActiveX, and aren't just limited to custom software built in 2002.
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).
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.
Glad I don't work for them directly. We provide some software that integrates with it.
Windows X10? THE BANNER ADS, THE GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING :)
Actualy major flashback - purple bastard gorilla thing as well. Can't remember what it was calledn.
Not a happy memory but a complete one now :(
Are the decision makers blind to it? Or is it because in 10 years it's someone else's problem?
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.
If one is discovered now, it will be exploitable forever.
"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.
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.
About three weeks of frustration, but now I'd never want to go back. As a developer, Linux is so much more flexible.
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?).
So what did you do, stare at a wall for 20 days and then finally do the upgrade on the 21st day? This makes absolutely no sense to me.
Edit: To clarify, this was in my first weeks of Linux. I'm no longer this noob (in fact, teachers and classmates regard me as the local linux guru, even the teacher that is teaching us linux basics).
Perhaps a short introduction might have been useful, but it depends on the person what you want to use and thus what you should be taught first. I'd be bored if it introduced me to things like the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom when I didn't even know what executable permissions were. Fun fact: last semester we got Linux lessons in school and this (u)random difference is one of the things they taught (alongside the basics like rm and grep usage). Nobody even knows what entropy is.
This works well when you already know enough to have a mental framework. For learning something new, say Forth or Prolog or Haskell, a longer document might be worth reading.
I know right? In XP you just had a list which you would look through and that's it. In Vista+ there are always two or three categories which might contain it. Sure the search feature is your friend, but for that you need to know what term Microsoft thought to use.
Had, not have, but yes that was true. We all need to learn to use things that are new to us though, don't we?
It's more like a lack of understanding that the system is different at its core. Of course there is a learning curve, and not everything is the same. I have been a long time Windows User but now I appreciate way more bash on Linux than any other shell on the Windows world. And permissions are key to prevent breaking your system when you don't know what you are doing, so they are very good safeguards in that sense.
Of course, but it still was frustrating. Anyhow, that was how my XP upgrade went :)
I don't really understand what you mean here. Are you saying all Linux issues are either driver issues or issues due to the open source mindset (the ecosystem) of Linux?
> while the latter [learning new ways of doing things] is taste.
(If I understand you correctly...) I think it's what you're used to more than taste. I had issues the first few weeks, but that wasn't because I prefer Windows, it's because I was used to Windows. Taste is sometimes defined by what you are used to, but not always. Music is a good example: we don't always like what we are used to or heard in the past, oftentimes our taste in music is completely different from what we have been exposed to the most.
At around the time of Windows 8 beta/preview I switched to Linux. I've been developing with Windows since, er.. DOS. It took about a month to re-wire my muscle memory, but once the initial pain is over I feel free in so many ways. I now enjoy my work, and I have my computer back.
I know exactly what you mean :)
A GP is a private limited company usually that is paid by the NHS to accept patients. The structure is usually 2-3 GPs as directors (partners) and then they employ others. The NHS also pays them to look after student doctors.
There are some exceptions where a GP rents a surgery or health center place from the health authority and gets equipment included but that's a rarity these days.
All this is a complete flipping mess, inefficient and expensive but that's what happens when you privatise half of the health services.
From experience as well, as I worked in that sector for a bit, GPs are total incompetent assholes. You're better going to a walk in center or a hospital with a walk in unit. They're not about saving every last penny of the bottom line then.
Many people treat computers as appliances that either work or don't work. Like an expensive toaster.
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.
If you can't produce a system (hardware, software, and "support" if absolutely necessary) which can outlast a toaster by design (decade or two at least), without a need to "upgrade" these elements, then many a consumer would naturally compare your engineering unfavorably to that of the toaster.
I'm thinking the second, but I might be wrong..