Switching over to windows wouldn't just be extremely costly from an IT perspective but would require millions of dollars in new hardware. We are in the red in part because of the pandemic, existing problems in our industry accelerated by the last few years, and because a large percentage of our patients are on Medicare, which the fed govt shrinks fixed service payments for every year.
I can't imagine convincing our administration to switch over to Linux across the hospital without a clear, obvious, and more importantly short-term financial payoff.
Does this make financial sense? Probably not in the short run, which is an issue for most companies nowadays. But in the long run? I think it's the right choice.
Anyway, i totally agree with you. The convincing part here is short of clear and obvious for administration types. Until MS finally bricks it's OS and renders it totally unusable they can continue to do whatever shit they want and keep mocking their loyal customers forever.
True story.
1/ imagine running >1000 legacy applications, some never updated in 20 years 2/ imagine a byzantine mix of local data centers, VPCs in aws/gcp/azure 3/ imagine a IT departament run by a lot of people who have never learned anything new since they were hired
That would be your typical large, boring entity such as a bank, public utility or many of the big public companies.
Yeah, there is no law of physics preventing this, but it's actually nearly impossible to disentangle an organization from decades of mess.
People have continued to run old management systems inside of virtual machines and similar solutions. You can sandbox it, reset it, do all kinds of wondrous things if you use modern technologies in an era-appropriate way. Run your old Windows software inside of a VM, or tweak it to run well on Wine if you have the source. The reason this mess happened is that all of those software are literally running a desktop OS in mission critical applications.
I have worked as an embedded engineer for a while and I can't count the number of nonsensical stuff I've seen incompetent people running on unpatched, obsolescent Windows XP and 7 machines. This mess is 100% self inflicted.