US taxman blows Win XP deadline, must now spend millions on custom support

"Microsoft negotiates the prices of such contracts privately, and neither it nor the IRS will say what the agency is paying."

The IRS should trade no tax audit for the support. Better yet, just dump Microsoft and see how fast Microsoft offers free updates just to keep a large client.

Another win for closed source software.

It's not just that the various government bods have run past the deadline and thus have to spend taxpayer money on 'extended' support, it's that they moving from XP to Win7. So the when support for Win7 runs out, they get to go through the same shite all over again with the badly written, 'must have' closed source apps which can't run on a current OS.

I can understand small companies, like Mr Pott described, running into upgrade problems but government bods, on the scale of the IRS, do have financial clout. What's to stop them from saying, "if you want our contract, you hand over the source code, so if you can't or won't support it, we will"?

A budget that size means the agency will spend nearly $800 for each desktop it migrates. By way of comparison, the average price of a brand-new PC was just $544.30 in the third quarter of 2013, the most recent period for which IDC has figures available.

Not that unreasonable then, because as well as buying the base machine, it has to be configured for use and probably also needs licence fees to be paid for all the extra proprietary software being added.

Still, MS have performed a small public service here. $30million off the enforcement budget means some people will escape being audited this year.

Fallacy ?

They were going to do it, had it planned but then there was disaster then Iraq then Afghanistan then Bosnia then Libya then finance sector meltdown then intervention to deal with finance sector meltdown (I think they call it financial easing?) then ... and now potentially there is Ukraine.

So, you see, it has always been on the cards but seriously more important stuff barged it out of the way and gobbled up available capital, reserve and maxed out guvmint borrowing.

Sad, very, very sad?

It's always the same argument: legacy applications not supporting a newer OS version. A part of me wants to say "fair enough". But with an EOL heads-up in 2008, and legacy applications which must have been legacy since then, what have their IT departments been doing with taxpayer's money in the meantime?

5+ years isn't too short of a notice for any number of software or hardware products to be replaced. Probably the actual IT guys have been told by management to not be drama queens since they first mentioned it, repeatedly. And now, with custom contracts (presumably not exactly cheap), more money is going to be wasted. In many companies heads would be chopped off for this; not so in the public sector, where they can spend money which isn't theirs anyway...

Yeah I know, some big corporate entities are no better, but at least they are not spending my money.

Insurance Policy?

Putting to one side the issue of a late migration from XP, I suspect the main reason both the US and UK governments have done deals, is that they need to have the option to call upon support IF anything actually goes wrong, before the systems are swapped out. It would be very embarrassing if they didn't have support then a service outage happened due to a major previously unreported hole in 2003/XP et al. ...

So I suspect the reason governments and major users are signing support contracts is more for reasons of security and insurance rather than because they believe they are really necessary. Obviously the cost of the 'insurance' is such that it is encouraging these major customers to give priority to migrating away from XP.

No problem

The U.S. is very good at pissing away tax payer money. Obama's handouts over the past two terms to companies who took the money and then went bankrupt is well documented. Obama and the clan have taken more paid holidays than any other U.S. President in history. They just keep exploiting tax payers every chance they get. It's quite the disgrace.

Likely an easy IT spend decision

...compared to what's spent keeping other, much older gov systems running -- not to mention the seemingly endless inability to successfully drive a major IT project.