XP just another in a long line of Microsoft upgrades that the company must convince everyone to buy in order to keep the company's profits from falling-- there's nothing revolutionary about it. Since the company has already sold Windows to every man, woman, and child are there many new customers even left? All thats left is to sell upgrades to existing customers. What other company gets to sell customers the same non-consumable product over and over and over again at such frequencey? Yes, I realize there's been improvements to Windows over the years. But there has only been real significant improvements every 5 years or so.

Recently at my company, the site manager has started using the phrase "technology bullshit" to describe many IT projects. At first I and many others thought he "just didn't get it" and must be a moron. Now I'm coming to realize he's right to a large extent. In IT we often spend large sums of money upgrading and changing systems and technologies. The cost to the company to make these changes is often not trival, yet it's nearly impossible to accuratly assess the payout after we do the project.

This is in complete contrast to other projects in the company. Other, non-IT, projects absolutely have to justify a payout with-in a fairly short timespan or the project doesn't happen. Why should IT be any different?

One project that often doesn't need to happen is upgrading Windows and Office every year or two. In many cases we are happy with how these work and see no need to change anything. The last time we upgraded Office it was only because Microsoft purposfully made it impractical to keep the old version-- people from other companies were e-mailing us attachments that we couldn't read with our older version of Office. Unforunetly many are naieve enough to believe the claim that if you add new features, the file format has to change. There is no technical reason why MS couldn't develop an extendable format that allows older versions of Office to just ignore the new information in the file, much like most web browsers do.

This forced upgrading is costing American business billions in lost profits being sent to Microsoft and/or wasted on man hours implementing stuff that doesn't really need to be changed. Yet, I saw Bill Gates on Charle Rose two nights ago claiming that Windows XP will introduce new improvements in productivity which will in turn help revive the economy! Is he really that arogant, or does he just think we're all idiots? It was really hard to tell.

In short if your current system meets your needs, I see little need of upgrading. And if you're already running Windows 2000, I see no need to upgrade at all.