The Pentagon is issuing to switch 4,000,000 PC's to Windows 10

[Balloers100]

The Pentagon is issuing to switch 4,000,000 PC's to Windows 10

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/17/technology/windows-10-pentagon/

The Pentagon can just order it's people like this to switch to a new Operating System (OS) that fast without it's people wanting to switch this fast?

I always thought that the U.S. Government usually allows it's people to gradually switch slowly. At least what I read from years before.

 

[dragonbird]

Fairly normal. These things don't get decided by the individual users. There are patch management procedures, security management, compatibility with backend system, they have to be done in a methodical way.

 

[GuyNwah]

What's more amazing is all those computers are upward compatible with Windows 10. Government agencies are among the worst for keeping long-obsolete hardware in service.

Bit it's their computer; their IT department tells you what to run on it.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

There was some story about a rocket launch center where they still use 8" floppies and ancient computers. Basically if it works - don't break it.

---------- Updated at 11:09 AM ----------

ISS are more up to speed though. They switched their computers to Linux.

 

[dragonbird]

What's more amazing is all those computers are upward compatible with Windows 10. Government agencies are among the worst for keeping long-obsolete hardware in service.

Bit it's their computer; their IT department tells you what to run on it.

Yup, and they're also slow to upgrade the OS. Governments (not just the US) were the main reason why MS had to keep extending the support on Windows XP. When I retired in 2010, the Singapore Government, which tends to be pretty forward-thinking on such things, was still rolling out Windows 7 (and in most cases they were upgrading from XP, not Vista.)

It doesn't surprise me that the Pentagon are doing it in a planned and mandatory way. What does surprise me slightly is that they're doing it so early. They probably skipped Win 8 though.

---------- Updated at 09:42 AM ----------

There was some story about a rocket launch center where they still use 8" floppies and ancient computers. Basically if it works - don't break it.

The 8" floppies would surprise me, for purely practical reasons. Still using an OS from that era wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. We got a request from one Government agency in around 2007 to replace a small system that had originally been written back in the mid '80s when documentation was almost non-existent. Nobody knew how it worked, and they'd never dared upgrade it. I can't remember what the language was, but it ran on PC-DOS.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Here it is: