Old dogs and new tricks...

It's unusual for me to blog on work related stuff, usually there is so much stupidity going on in the faith based communities that I struggle to keep up with it all, however there is one topic that has bubbled up which kind of links the two things (loosely) and one which causes me irritation to the point where I feel I have to share it.

The topic is IE6 or to those not in the know, Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 6. This product was released back in 2001 (this is like the ice age in computing terms) and at the time was a reasonable WEB browser; like most Microsoft products the first few incarnations were buggy and at the time people didn't really appreciate the cunning and persistence of hackers and virus writers so it had lots of vulnerabilities into the bargain. Because of the strength of Microsoft's marketing machine and the various deals struck with hardware vendors the browser became very pervasive, most large corporates installed it and it became part of the "standard package" of stuff that ended up on all those millions of corporate grey boxes under office workers desks in the early years of the noughties.

The problem is not that this browser was buggy nor that it was full of holes that hackers could exploit but the problem, our problem, is that it's still there! Reluctant to switch to more modern alternatives because of inconvenience or perhaps cost or simple ignorance the majority of large corporates and Government departments in the UK still use this browser. At this point, if you're not in the IT game you may be asking "so what, why is this a problem?", but it really is, not only do we waste millions of hours and pounds every year dealing with the viruses and exploits that this browser misses, like some religion stuck in it's dogmatic tradition such inertia actually stultifies progress. In WEB terms 2001 was a long, long time ago, since then there have been all kinds of improvements and innovations that make people's use of cloud resources easier and more profitable, but those people cannot exploit these advances whilst their primary access vehicle to these resources (i.e. their browser) is based on technology that's 10 years old, consequently our European and American competitors are stealing a march on us. This story about Google dropping support for IE6 summarises some of the issues quite nicely.

Another harmful side effect of this resistance to change is that the development costs of software companies delivering cloud based applications and services to UK businesses are forced up by the need for more and more time needed for testing and supporting old technology; this is a drag on productivity and increases the overall cost of software innovation in the UK. If we are not careful we could find ourselves out on a limb in terms of the tools and applications that leading UK companies and Government are able to exploit. Many industry figures, companies and institutions have commented about this issue recently, there is even a Downing street petition that aims to convince HM Government departments to ditch this dinosaur of a product. If you are affected by this and/or have the same concerns as me then pop over there and sign up, who knows, miracles may happen :)