4 ms·

Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, bef

Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS). Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it. We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along. 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.

killjoywashere 8y ago
> Windows 95 in a VM Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.
- fsloth 8y ago
  Statistically a new software project - especially if done by a team with no common history of past successes - is risky. So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.
S_A_P 8y ago
Fellow consultant here that has seen a lot of similar issues. I am currently tasked with rewriting a Delphi application that supports business in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It was written by a guy in his garage in Alabama. He sold the source code to the former parent company of my client. We now have a vm of the image of the guys laptop and the heavily customized Delphi environment required to build this application should a change be required. Apparently he built a bunch of delphi ide plugins to configure the environment, and should you try to build it with the latest Delphi IDE, you are SOL.
ramshanker 8y ago
Yes yes, there is a WinXP PC in our department with screen covered with a white paper with large font size text "This PC is under remote operation by Structure department, Do Not Shut it down." Obviously there is a highly domain specific application for our Civil & Structural works last updated 10+ years ago. No one familiar/willing to upgrade it's internal licensing systems to work on newer Windows. So here we go. Whoever needs to work on it, take Remote Desktop. Simple.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  For some of this stuff (Autocad, I'm looking at you...) it used to be the case that you could shell out a one-time $$$$ and get a license for v5.0 that would work for all eternity. The companies even gave you minor upgrades to support new OSes. But since these guys have now switched to a subscription licensing model, they no longer do that, so there are scattered XP boxen around running ancient versions of various expensive software that just keeps working.
Tor3 8y ago
> 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate. It's not enough to finish writing the requirements. One of our customers won't touch anything unless 15 years of support is guaranteed. And that's what they get.
eitally 8y ago
"Reasonable prices" is only fair compared to, for example, Oracle's gouging. It's not that MS has actually reasonable support pricing, just that ELA maintenance has become a cornerstone of most CIO's IT budget so there's no real incentive to do anything differently. I think the more important factor here is that MS sysadmins are a dime a dozen and the ramp from supporting an on-prem data center to "Azure Cloud" is a lot lower than learning something brand new.

killjoywashere 8y ago

> Windows 95 in a VM Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.

fsloth 8y ago
Statistically a new software project - especially if done by a team with no common history of past successes - is risky. So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.

S_A_P 8y ago

Fellow consultant here that has seen a lot of similar issues. I am currently tasked with rewriting a Delphi application that supports business in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It was written by a guy in his garage in Alabama. He sold the source code to the former parent company of my client. We now have a vm of the image of the guys laptop and the heavily customized Delphi environment required to build this application should a change be required. Apparently he built a bunch of delphi ide plugins to configure the environment, and should you try to build it with the latest Delphi IDE, you are SOL.

ramshanker 8y ago

Yes yes, there is a WinXP PC in our department with screen covered with a white paper with large font size text "This PC is under remote operation by Structure department, Do Not Shut it down." Obviously there is a highly domain specific application for our Civil & Structural works last updated 10+ years ago. No one familiar/willing to upgrade it's internal licensing systems to work on newer Windows. So here we go. Whoever needs to work on it, take Remote Desktop. Simple.

semi-extrinsic 8y ago
For some of this stuff (Autocad, I'm looking at you...) it used to be the case that you could shell out a one-time $$$$ and get a license for v5.0 that would work for all eternity. The companies even gave you minor upgrades to support new OSes. But since these guys have now switched to a subscription licensing model, they no longer do that, so there are scattered XP boxen around running ancient versions of various expensive software that just keeps working.

Tor3 8y ago

> 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate. It's not enough to finish writing the requirements. One of our customers won't touch anything unless 15 years of support is guaranteed. And that's what they get.

eitally 8y ago

"Reasonable prices" is only fair compared to, for example, Oracle's gouging. It's not that MS has actually reasonable support pricing, just that ELA maintenance has become a cornerstone of most CIO's IT budget so there's no real incentive to do anything differently. I think the more important factor here is that MS sysadmins are a dime a dozen and the ramp from supporting an on-prem data center to "Azure Cloud" is a lot lower than learning something brand new.