Microsoft Vista, IE7 Banned By U.S. DOT

An anonymous reader writes "According to a memo being reported on by Information week, the US Department of Transportation has issued a moratorium on upgrading Microsoft products. Concerns over costs and compatability issues has lead the federal agency to prevent upgrades from XP to Vista, as well as to stop users from moving to IE 7 and Office 2007. As the article says, 'In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."'"

A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[eldavojohn]

Ok, so the Department of Transportation can't make a business case for it. Big deal.

Allow me to strike some real fear into Microsoft. I work for a large Fortune 500 company with six digits of employees. While it's not our primary product, we write software as a lot of companies do.

When IE7 came out, I decided to use my work legal machine to install it to try it out. This resulted in a next day 7 am nastygram from my system administrator stating that I am authorized to install any software that isn't married to the kernel. Not only were we told not to use it, we were threatened not to install it OR ELSE I wouldn't be able to enter my time or access shared community sites internal to the company.

Because a lot of our company's tools don't work very nicely inside of it. So I'm still using IE6 and my company sure isn't going to upgrade my MS Office suite. Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?

So what would scare Microsoft more? The fact that a government department isn't using it or the fact that many companies like mine are still writing stuff for the old software hence forcing our customers to stick with IE6 or any version of Firefox?

Re:As a webmaster

[Anonymous Coward]

To say there is reason specifically to not upgrade from IE6 is basically saying that they've developed a bunch of IE6-only web applications (with a bunch of ActiveX controls that require lax security settings perhaps.. or maybe just by developers that have never visited w3.org and have used Microsoft's [wrong] implementation of Javascript/HTML/CSS). They've screwed themselves on this one.. eventually as IE6 security updates stop coming (if they haven't already?) they're going to have endless problems when their users continue to use it to browse the internet..

What are the Reasons for not Upgrading to IE7?

[jeevesbond]

I can think of one very big reason to upgrade to IE7 (unless Opera/Firefox is an option) and that's better web standards support. The web development community is going to drop support for IE6 very quickly (I give it approx. 6 months) because the standards support is so bad.

IE7 has a long way to go with this, but it's a massive improvement [msdn.com] over 6. It's not as if it costs any money, aside from bandwidth, to download it.

Obviously I would advise them to just use Opera or Firefox and switch to Linux while they're at it. But if that isn't an option they should at least take the free IE upgrade. The decision to not upgrade Office is a sound one though.

Routine..

[joshetc]

I work for DHS and we just migrated to XP / Office 2003. It is routine for government agencies (just about all major computer systems really) to wait a LONG time before upgrading.. Everyone already knew people wouldn't mass-migrate to Vista until at least SP1 was out...

Microsoft's standing on upgrading to Vista?

[LoudMusic]

Microsoft employs thousands of people as well - I wonder what their standing is on upgrading to Vista and associated products. Sure they get the software for free and the hardware for cheap, but it's still thousands of computers I bet they're replacing too.

And what's happening to all of these displaced PCs? Someone should build a cluster!

Re:Seriously, so what?

[div_2n]

It is no small deal when a government agency specifically bans products internally for very specific reasons. Case in point is that we do a lot of business with the US Government. There are websites we MUST use for business purposes. IE7 specifically doesn't work with how they have been designed. This means that as IT Manager, I have instituted the same policy (IE7 ban) here.

The point is that there is a trickle down effect. Why do you think MS has fought the ODF issue in Mass. so hard?

Re:A Nightmare on One Microsoft Way

[RetroGeek]

Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?

Well I set up a machine specifically for IE7 testing. This is on an Intranet that is isolated from everything.

After IE7 started it wanted to connect to the MSN site. I waited until it timed out, then set the start page to "about:blank".

The next time IE7 started, it again wanted to connect to MSN. In fact it ALWAYS wants to connect to MSN, regardless of the blank page setting.

Annoying as hell, and what is it reporting to Microsoft that is so important (to Microsoft)?

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Savior_on_a_Stick]

We won't be migrating to Vista either.

Most likely upgrade path for us is to linux - but only when we either change our accounting package to one supported on that platform, or Intuit ports to linux, or Crossover Office fully supports the latest QB enterprise.

Second likely path would be an OSX server -if and only if the price and licensing were not as heinous as they are with M$.

Of course, the third option would be not to migrate at all.

Re:As a webmaster

[swansontec]

IE7 may have its user interface flaws, but it does offer increased support for standards. Not enough, mind you, but better than its predecessor. As long as people hold back on the upgrade to IE7 (or Firefox / Opera), the Internet at large will remain stunted. Simple things, like using transparent PNG's, will suddenly become possible once enough people switch. I'm tired of writing ugly, hackish HTML and CSS just to work around the flaws in IE6.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[networkBoy]

Are you nuts?
Then we'd have wGnome Vs. wKDE flamewars. That's the only damn thing I seem to like about windows is the unified desktop manager.
-nB

the DOT is not alone in this

[ChrisA90278]

Our company has gone further than the DOT. Not only is upgrade not allowed but a PC with Vista is not allowed to connect to the corporate network. Our government customer has banned Vista from it's network too and we need to inter operate. The DOT is not alone. Many organizations are going to wait and do 6 or 12 months of testing first.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Water]

We just finished our XP upgrades last month. I was on 2000 until mid January