Texas takes a hard line on upgrading to Vista

Texas state Senate bans Vista from use in government agencies: Senate provision contained in a budget bill that still requires final approval By Eric Lai

April 2, 2009 (Computerworld) The Texas state Senate yesterday gave preliminary approval to a state budget that includes a provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista without written consent of the legislature.

Normally, I would have let this go by without comment, but this is one of those cases where someone has sold the Texas Senate a false bill of goods and they have bought it, hook, line and virus.

"We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide," Hinojosa said

Yes, there are known problems. The first is that you must run Vista on real hardware. Unlike other versions of Microsoft's operating systems, where you could limp along at or below the minimum requirements, Vista really will not behave on even the minimum requirements, despite what Microsoft's marketing people would have you believe. Secondly, if you are not keeping your applications up to date, you might experience problems running under Vista. Further, if you are running home grown software, sloppily coded, you will find problems running it in Vista because there are a number of improvements to the security model that will break several applications. I have experienced this with slipshod and older code. I have experienced it with XP, and with Windows 98 too, so I was not surprised.

Microsoft has stopped writing code for Windows XP. It will only write critical (and that is what Microsoft considers critical) patches for things that pop up. In a recent security sweep of my organization, I discovered a number of XP machines that were not even running the most current version of Internet Explorer (IE 7, we are still working on IE 8). IE 6 has a number of well known and unpatched security holes, leading to a more sieve like experience for most users.

Of course, Texas is taking this tact because of the costs of upgrading to Vista. This is not a surprise, but Texas is going to discover what most businesses found in the late 1990s - failure to stay current, just because things work, will lead to higher costs downstream as it becomes more and more expensive to become current. And that is the real burden that the taxpayers will have to bear.