Windows XP upgrade proves tricky business for John Lewis

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28790582

by ilghiro • 12 years ago

53 66 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

lucb1e11• 12 years ago

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.

louhike2• 12 years ago

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

lucb1e11• 12 years ago

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

areyouseriousss2• 12 years ago

three weeks of frustration

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.

lucb1e11• 12 years ago

Try to use it and fail to do basic tasks, like, typing "run.sh" assuming it would do the same as "run.bat", forgetting that it should be "./run.sh". Then it still doesn't work because, even as root, you "don't have permissions". Turned out you needed to give it executable permissions too. That kind of frustration of getting things to work.

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).

bellerocky• 12 years ago

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.

Alterlife• 12 years ago

I wouldn't necessarily call Peoplesoft beautiful... but the current version (atleast in my opinion) is not clunky.

What version of Peoplesoft are you talking about?

tormeh6• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

danudey3• 12 years ago

A huge number of Java apps built for enterprises or corporations are Windows-native as well. Either compiled down to a .exe, installed via a Windows-native Installshield installer, built using Windows-only native-library code, or designed assuming Windows (e.g. referencing C:\ directly in the code).

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?'

ejr• 12 years ago

There are a large number of medical systems that still require XP as well. Many of those proprietary systems and programs were specifically built for it and changes are both expensive and drastic. Both frowned upon by hospital administration.

smackfu• 12 years ago

The bizarre thing is that ActiveX is about letting your run native code from a web browser, so it should have a better platform-matching UI than a JVM or a web app.

blatherard• 12 years ago

John Lewis, the subject of the article, is an employee-owned company [1] that operates multiple business lines. I don't know the internal dealings of the company, but I'd attribute their slow upgrade path more to the costs and difficulties associated with a large-scale rollout rather than managerial indifference. I also wouldn't delight at the cost of the upgrade, which will directly affect the profitability of the company and therefore reduce the profit-sharing that all employee-partners participate in.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership#Organisa...

yasth• 12 years ago

ActiveX wasn't used for HTML input boxes. It was generally used for companies to leverage their existing desktop developers in a "web" context. The reason it basically couldn't be ported to other platforms is because it could use all of the win32 libraries. You could literally take a desktop app, and inside of a couple days get an ActiveX "Web" App.

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.

danudey3• 12 years ago

In this sense, ActiveX was often used as a sort of JNLP replacement. Go to a website, click a thing, boom, app. No installing, no deploying, no upgrading. The appeal is easy to see.

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.

dzhiurgis• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

mpclark• 12 years ago

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...

allegory7• 12 years ago

I have a couple of members of my family rolling out Windows 7 to doctors across the UK. They're on it but the doctors are cheap arses and the NHS won't cut the entire cost of the migration even if it does put patient data at risk.

nknighthb• 12 years ago

I was under the impression most UK doctors were basically employees of the NHS. What sort of structure calls for them to pay for upgrading software/equipment?

daigoba66• 12 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

I am somewhat sympathetic to that. Because if you look at it, replacing a perfectly good, expensive machine for a new one every three years sounds ridiculous. But this situation is 50% greed and 50% technological progress, so we keep throwing away stuff that works to get stuff that does the same, only a bit faster.

danudey3• 12 years ago

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.

danelectro2• 12 years ago

I sure have found a lot more discarded PC's than I have toasters.

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.

allegory7• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

"£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.

allegory7• 12 years ago

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.

al2o3cr• 12 years ago

"Windows X (10)"

Windows X10? THE BANNER ADS, THE GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING :)

allegory7• 12 years ago

Ha I'd forgotten about X10 banner SPAM.

Actualy major flashback - purple bastard gorilla thing as well. Can't remember what it was calledn.

beavis22• 12 years ago

What I would like to know is; why do people put up with this stuff?

Are the decision makers blind to it? Or is it because in 10 years it's someone else's problem?

allegory7• 12 years ago

They are incapable of looking forward more than a couple of months...

marktangotango• 12 years ago

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.

Sephiroth87• 12 years ago

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..

Windows XP upgrade proves tricky business for John Lewis

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