“Even with Windows 7 and Office 2010 on the horizon, most companies have yet to make the change to the latest Microsoft software. The United States Army this week announced it will be moving all of its Windows-based computers to the Vista operating system and will also be ditching Office 2003 for Office 2007. These changes are to be completed by the end of the year,” Emil Protalinski reports for Ars Technica.
“As it currently stands now, estimates are that half of the army’s computers are currently using Office 2007 and 13 percent are powered by Vista. Both applications were released by Microsoft in the same timeframe, but for the Army, the switch to Office 2007 began before the switch to Vista. This is a typical occurrence in the industry because Office 2007 rarely requires upgrades to hardware, while Vista might be a different story when it comes a large network of computers (the Army has an estimated 744,000 desktops),” Protalinski reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: They say that the purpose of a military is to kill people and break things. For the U.S. Army that latter bit must also apply to their own computers. We pray that Windows PCs aren’t running anything mission critical or, God forbid, weapons systems. Hopefully, when these Microsoft desktops inevitably fail, only the Army’s network gets killed.
