A Technical Christmas Carol

By Asavin Wattanajantra, writer at Metia.

Eddie Scrooge doesn't like spending money. He has a successful business, but likes to hoard his cash. He doesn't understand why he would need to spend money on the technology he's had for many years which is doing just fine.

But one Christmas Eve he was presented with the three geek spirits of Past, Present and Future.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

The Ghost of Christmas Past transports Scrooge to 2001. He was younger, fresh-faced and less cynical. He wanted to leave the Windows 95 and MS-DOS era, and find something which would work better for his business and crash less. Windows XP was the answer – it was easy to use and stable, with great hardware and software compatibility.

Millions of other people thought it was the bomb. Scrooge believed it so perfect that he would never need another system again. In a few years, it would become the most popular operating system in the world.

The Ghost of Christmas Present

Scrooge is presented with a vision of the present. Windows XP is working fine, but his business is using a system which is more than 10 years old – a lifetime in technology terms.

Windows is ageing – it’s designed to work on and interact with old technology. But it is working “fine”. Scrooge thinks “if it's not broken, why fix it?”

However, his rivals have already updated to new systems like Windows 8 and are feeling the benefits. They're saving time and money through increases in speed and efficiency. Their employees are less frustrated and increasing productivity.

The Ghost of Christmas Future

Finally Scrooge sees a vision of the future, and it's not good. His company has had some major security problems, as Windows XP is a system that hasn't been updated for a long time - April 2014.  There are no patches available to fix vulnerabilities. He's also seen hardware vendors stop their support of XP quicker than he expected.

Scrooge's rivals have shot ahead due to their increases in productivity, together with a happier staff that can work anywhere, using devices such as smartphones and tablets with ease.

Christmas Day

As dawn breaks, Scrooge is online looking at ways he can move his business to Windows 8.1 as quickly as possible. It turns out it's nowhere near as difficult as he feared, and before long he's ordering Surface devices for his entire workforce to spread some Christmas cheer (but in the back of his mind to get them to work harder :)).

Merry Christmas Everyone!