Your Tax Dollars At Work (Again)

As you probably know, the Windows XP operating system has been around for over 12 years and a lot of people would rather keep it than move on to something newer, but Microsoft terminated official support on April 8th and that was that. Many organizations had taken the six years of warnings to heart and migrated to another operating system, but not the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Only 52,000 of their 110,000 Windows-powered computers were upgraded to Windows 7. Now they have a problem. If they follow the rules, and you'd think they will, they'll have to pay Microsoft for Custom Support. How much? Well, using Microsoft's standard rate of $200 per PC, it'll be $11.6 million for one year. That leaves $18.4 million of their $30 million budget to finish the upgrades themselves, which works out to $317 per computer. Another fine example of our government's inability to do much of anything right.