We're dealing with one of those at work right now and it's truly exposed MS's lack of care about customer issues.

It's one thing when a company forces you to upgrade word processor software or something because generally your old now unsupported software will continue to hum along just fine and do all the things you expect of it. However our company is being forced now to upgrade our Great Plains Dynamics software because if we don't, our payroll system shuts down as of the first of the year.

That's because the GP software is constantly evolving based upon federal tax law and MS always provides new tax tables and updates each year to perform your necessary tax duties. However, to promote their new 9.0 version, they've conveniently told 7.5 customers that those updates will no longer be available. There's an 8.0 version but it's due to lose support next year.

Now MS doesn't deal directly with customers for support of their products. They instead force you to cut a deal with a local partner who will provide your upgrades and (for a substantial fee) any support you require to customize and debug your application. That support costs thousands of dollars a year but really all you get for that is a phone number to call and whine to and the software upgrade installation software.

Now to make this a bit more complicated, I work for a company that is actually a contractor to the City of Phoenix so we don't control our IT budget and we don't own and control directly any of our computer hardware. Anything we do has to be with the blessing of the city government and that process is often slow and painful. We tend to be the bastard stepchildren when doling out the money.

The natural inclination in this would be to go ahead and do the full upgrade to GP 9.0 but we found that our current network and workstation hardware would require about $50,000 in upgrades. That simply isn't in our budget so we're forced to do the interim update to 8.0. Now mind you that 7.5 is doing everything we currently need and that we have a large amount of customization and some external addons attached to it that have given us some real headaches during our upgrade attempts. When we contacted our local support partner to ask them how much they'd charge us to do the upgrade for us, it came out to tens of thousands of dollars and amount we couldn't squeeze out of our budget.

We have spent hundreds of hours now trying to get this new version to work and have had to shut down one piece of addon software to get us past a halt in the upgrade process that even the partner didn't understand. We found out that the partners are given exlusive scripting and training that's unavailable to the pubic to give them an advantage over some IT department doing things themselves.

We'll somehow get by all this but in the end it's merely embittered me even more about doing business with this unethical business entity. Were I starting a new company, there wouldn't be an MS product in it. Servers and workstations would be Linux, databases would be MY-SQL, and all applications would be open-source. And MS wonders why it's the target of so many hackers.

Art