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>Unfortunately, it was procured in the pre-Web 2.0 era when "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" looked a lot more solid than it does today -- and now it's out there in the wild, and replacing it would cost millions.)

I don't believe it.

I'm sure you can find lots of software consultants with posh cars and big offices to tell you it would cost millions. But really. The PDF is on a file server, all you need to do is link it for the client, how hard can it be.

A decent web developer could probably do it and test it cross browser in a few days - lets say it's a man-month, that's going to be what, $20k absolute top for the project. Even if you had to start from scratch it wouldn't take $millions.

He isn't saying it would cost millions to replace that piece of software. He's saying it would cost millions to replace the hundreds or thousands of ActiveX controls in use, with that being an example of how absurdly pervasive the technology is in the UK government.

>a proprietary ActiveX control in order to view planning applications on the desktop ... in PDF format [...] it's out there in the wild, and replacing it would cost millions

I don't think that's what he is saying. But I'll accept that's what you are saying and ask you for a citation on this pervasive ActiveX control - I can then research it as my sister is in Town Planning here in the UK.

ActiveX controls work in IE8, so they probably wouldn't need to be rewritten or ported. But we'll never know. The UK government is short circuiting the process by asserting just the act of testing would be too burdensome. I call bullshit.

[disclosure: I wrote that blog post, so consider my opinions here highly biased. :-) ]

I've spoken with another developer or three that tell me that, although ActiveX controls remain supported, security policies have changed in some meaningful ways between versions of IE. The result is that your controls that were working fine in IE 6 stop working in later versions of IE. I have not personally confirmed this (and god send that I will never have to).

It wouldn't cost billions if it was allowed to be managed by private industry. This is the kind of BS that corporate developers are frustrated by on a daily basis -- painful, but not difficult, drudgery. The crown's position, as the Sauciers recognized, is completely unjustified. Stasis is the easy way out, and just like no one was ever fired for choosing IBM, almost no one was ever fired for leaving good enough alone.

This coming from the guy in charge of a 15,000 seat enterprise migration from MS Office --> OpenOffice.org (and who was in charge last year of a 18,000 seat migration from Exchange/Outlook to Gmail). I have tons of similar war stories... but yet some how we are still able to get shit done.

If Microsoft (or someone else) built a self-contained "IE6 For Legacy Web Applications" download, that worked like Fluid/Prism (making an individual launcher for each legacy app), allowed a newer IE to live alongside it, and was guaranteed (literally, contractually) to function identically to IE6 proper, most of this problem would go away, I think.

"was guaranteed (literally, contractually)"

What benefit does Microsoft get to offset this huge potential liability?

The point of the contractual obligation isn't to assume liability in case they aren't the same, though; it's to force Microsoft (or whoever else) to prove, incontrovertibly, that they are the same, and therefore give the companies no wiggle-room. Without that proof, no company is going to bother either way, no matter how much liability they're spared.