Computer failures leave 80,000 civil servants in Britain without access to their systems; guess which vendor's software they were running?
A week-long crisis in the giant Department for Work and Pensions created a backlog of unprocessed claims with up to 80% of the ministry's 100,000 desk machines disrupted or knocked out by a blunder during maintenance.
Engineers battling to fix the problem last night claimed 95% were functioning fully again as they prepared to reboot the entire network after offices closed to the public.
Alan Johnson, the work and pensions secretary, has ordered an internal inquiry into the role of Microsoft and the American contractors EDS, who run the ministry's network as part of a £2bn information technology deal.
What baffles me is why governments insist on going with Microsoft products when cheaper and more reliable UNIX systems are easily available. Actually, it isn't so baffling at all; the PHBs use Windows, so they assume that "Computer=Windows Machine", and then insist that whoever wrote the pretty little operating system they use for sending emails be put in charge of the backroom services as well; who needs UNIX boxes with their ugly, intimidating command line interfaces? Where people once used to say "No one ever got fired for buying IBM", the same is now said of Microsoft - it's just too bad that Microsoft has never had IBM's emphasis on quality.
You'll be depressed then to know that until the late 1990's, a lot of U.S. military intelligence computer systems were UNIX-based. In the late 1990's, though, these systems were increasingly phased out in favor of windows.
Posted by: Andrew Reeves | November 29, 2004 at 06:49 PM