Run faster— your users are catching up to you!
A couple weeks ago I opened Time magazine and flipped to their Briefing section, where they offered a short glimpse of 10 or so top news items from the previous week. Nestled among quotes from the pope and the president’s stance on marijuana lay this gem:
95% of ATMs still operate using Windows XP, which came out in 2001.
Note: this briefing does NOT say “95% of ATMs are going to be unsupported shortly.” The briefing just says “95% of ATMs are still on Windows XP” and assumes everyone understands what it means. Shorthand like this would make a lot of sense in Wired, where the all-techie audience already knows Windows XP is on the chopping block. But this assumption came from Time magazine, one of the most widely-read publications in the world. Has the average Joe and Jane really become so tech-savvy they can read this briefing and understand its full implications?
In a word— yes. The public’s depth of awareness of infrastructure technology has reached a sophisticated level, and it continues to grow fast. So consider this tidbit your wake-up call that we all need to up our game if we’re going to stay even a handful of steps ahead of our increasingly tech-savvy users. Maintaining state-of-the-art systems, which used to be the sole purvey of IT decision-makers, is fast becoming of interest to the user community. So if you were thinking of waiting another year or two on issues of OS updates because your users will never know the difference—it’s time to think again.
