Is Yahoo! moving from FreeBSD?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-02-26 12:39, Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>Giorgos Keramidas writes:
>>On 2005-02-25 20:47, Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>>> Ted Mittelstaedt writes:
>>>> All throughout our businesses careers, we will be faced with this
>>>> problem of having to unlearn the old way of doing things and learn
>>>> new, better ways.
>>>
>>> Not necessarily.  When something works well enough, there's no reason to
>>> learn anything else.
>>
>> Not necessarily true all the time.  Otherwise, why isn't everyone still
>> using Microsoft Word 2.x or the first version of Outlook Express?
>
> A great many people still are.  Some people are still using MS-DOS.

This quickly diverges far too off-topic for my taste.  Trimming
excessively the quoted material, as you did before replying, doesn't
help much either.  The point being made is not about "great many
people", which includes people who work isolated from the rest of the
world on some archaic accounting program running on MS-DOS.

> For much of the population, a computer that works is all they need.
> They don't care if anything on the machine ever gets "upgraded" at
> all, and they will change to something new only if the existing
> machine breaks.

Which is a very acceptable and logical way of using computers.  Alas,
this doesn't explain why "change" is not so infrequent as you present
it in the business world.  There are other, more important reasons why
a business setup needs change more often than the typical, isolated user
who runs those archaic accounting packages on DOS.

Compatibility with the rest of the world.  When the rest of the world
uses program MS Office version 2003 to write documents, inevitably,
people who still use version 2.X of MS Office are blocked out.  This
means that every time a large enough critical mass of the business world
upgrades, the rest of the business world HAS to upgrade too.  Ergo
change.

Support.  When vendor X stops supporting version 1.X of their product,
business users who depend on features of this program are effectively
"forced" to upgrade to version 2.X.  Ergo change, again.

Change is not always easy to avoid.  Change is not something a business
should fear either.  Fear of change leads to decisions based on lots of
emotional, invalid reasons.