Windows 2000 continues to rule corporate marketshare

Win2k is very solid but this is a relative term. I don't feel it's the most stable-solid OS available but it is plenty reliable.

One thing overlooked about "few IT depts see any reason to upgrade" is that most IT depts don't want to upgrade - PERIOD.

The average user has no qualms about upgrading their desktop OS to try the latest and greatest. But your typical IT dept sees the world differently. The upgrade if, and only if they absolutely have to.

An IT dept in a large company has a large complex system they need to keep running. Any disruption to this IT infrastructure is most desirable and the modus operendi for them is "if it's not broke then don't fix it."

A few years ago the company I worked for sent me to a very large insurance company in CT to investigate a problem they were having. For starters there are various levels of bueracracy involved. It's not like a developer can just walk up to a live server and start making changes.

When I finally got access to a machine I ran the diags app that ships with our product. I saw that several DLL's were out of date and were not updated to the correct version by our installer. One of the IT managers told me that our product did update these DLL's and they were peeed about it. They deliberately reverted back to the older DLL's simply because all their software was verified to work with those older DLLs. They didn't care if newer DLLs were available or not... they were not interested.

It looked like our product was still working properly with the older DLLs and the problem they were showing me didn't appear to be related to an older DLL issue. It looked like it was something the the JVM that we spun up and used internally. But when I looked at the version of the JVM they had it wasn't one that I was familiar with. I searched the web for that particular version and couldn't find anything.

Eventually this large insurance company told us this JVM was a custom one-of-a-kind JVM they had gotten from Sun. There were some bugs they absolutely had to have fixed. The new JVM had the bug fixes but they didn't want to upgrade to the new JVM because of all the unknowns switching to a newer JVM would cause. So what did they do.... they twisted Suns arm enough to get them to create a custom JVM based on the version they were already running but with some specific bug fixes they wanted.

Bottom line is this... most IT departments don't upgrade their software or OS on a whim. Unless there is a good reason to upgrade it isn't going to happen.