8 ms·

Windows XP upgrade proves tricky business for John Lewis

53 points by ilghiro 12y ago

lucb1e 12y 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.
- louhike 12y ago
  Is it just a troll or did you really upgrade from Windows XP to a Linux distribution at your office recently?
  - lucb1e 12y ago
    No, not an entire office, but I do use Linux for work.
    - louhike 12y ago
      I'm asking because I'm interested in return on experience for this kind of upgrades. We heard mostly of migrations for non-techies employees, not for developers.
      - lucb1e 12y ago
        You should ask some developer companies, I think they'd have no problem sharing this kind of information with non-competitors. 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?).
- areyouseriousss 12y 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.
  - lucb1e 12y 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).
    - CalRobert 12y ago
      I'm sure there are other good resources too, but I thoroughly recommend The Linux Command Line from NoStarch press. There are times when just trying what comes to mind and googling stuff on StackExchange makes sense, and times when getting a good resource (e.g. a book) that covers the topic in detail makes sense. Moving to a completely new OS is the latter.
      - lucb1e 12y ago
        Hmm, I never liked those books on subjects like operating systems or programming languages or something. Tried a few times, but they generally have a low information density (telling it in the typical book-like fashion) and go into details that you don't need or remember. I usually learn by googling or asking others when I don't know what to google. 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.
bellerocky 12y 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 12y 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?
- tormeh 12y 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 12y 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.
dzhiurgis 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
    - JohnTHaller 12y ago
      Except that's not how it works. Microsoft has a hugely long support system set up for a given version of Windows. That's why XP was supported for so long. 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.
mpclark 12y 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...
- allegory 12y 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 12y 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?
    - allegory 12y ago
      No - they get a budget from which they have to buy equipment from a supplier. They get to choose the supplier from a tender list and they get to pick the software they want to pay for. 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.
- daigoba66 12y 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.
allegory 12y 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 12y 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.
  - allegory 12y 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 12y ago
  "Windows X (10)" Windows X10? THE BANNER ADS, THE GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING :)
marktangotango 12y 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 12y 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..

53 points by ilghiro 12y 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.

louhike 12y ago
Is it just a troll or did you really upgrade from Windows XP to a Linux distribution at your office recently?
- lucb1e 12y ago
  No, not an entire office, but I do use Linux for work.
  - louhike 12y ago
    I'm asking because I'm interested in return on experience for this kind of upgrades. We heard mostly of migrations for non-techies employees, not for developers.
    - lucb1e 12y ago
      You should ask some developer companies, I think they'd have no problem sharing this kind of information with non-competitors. 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?).
areyouseriousss 12y 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.
- lucb1e 12y 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).
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    I'm sure there are other good resources too, but I thoroughly recommend The Linux Command Line from NoStarch press. There are times when just trying what comes to mind and googling stuff on StackExchange makes sense, and times when getting a good resource (e.g. a book) that covers the topic in detail makes sense. Moving to a completely new OS is the latter.
    - lucb1e 12y ago
      Hmm, I never liked those books on subjects like operating systems or programming languages or something. Tried a few times, but they generally have a low information density (telling it in the typical book-like fashion) and go into details that you don't need or remember. I usually learn by googling or asking others when I don't know what to google. 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.

bellerocky 12y 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 12y 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?
tormeh 12y 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 12y 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.

dzhiurgis 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    Except that's not how it works. Microsoft has a hugely long support system set up for a given version of Windows. That's why XP was supported for so long. 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.

mpclark 12y 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...

allegory 12y 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 12y 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?
  - allegory 12y ago
    No - they get a budget from which they have to buy equipment from a supplier. They get to choose the supplier from a tender list and they get to pick the software they want to pay for. 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.
daigoba66 12y 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.

allegory 12y 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 12y 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.
- allegory 12y 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 12y ago
"Windows X (10)" Windows X10? THE BANNER ADS, THE GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING :)

marktangotango 12y 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 12y 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..