One problem is that as a vendor, we have to work to the lowest common denominator. It's still generally a requirement that you support IE6, despite the department of health encouraging hospitals to upgrade, because they have legacy apps where the vendor has disappeared or the upgrade is too expensive / painful for the hospital to bear.

We actually ship customers a custom build of Chromium which can only access our application (hospital policy generally dictates they must use IE to access the internet for "security" reasons) - we would love them to just use modern browsers so we can ditch our custom client but it doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon :-(

I worked at a hospital in 2008, where, mid-summer, the IT department had just approved the use of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (which was released in August 2004).

Note that this doesn't mean they were actually going to start deploying it. It just meant that they were open to the idea of doing so. I'd be surprised if they'd actually upgraded any machines yet.

The law firm my wife works for has just switched to the new version of office, because Word Perfect is no longer supported by their billing software. I don't even think their version was new either.

It's kind of sad that you'll only modernize when you'll no longer get paid. You'd think improving efficiency would be motive for modernization, but I guess not.

Probably why so many hospitals are choosing iPad over PCs.

Our software is so tied to PCs and IE that that's not even an option.