Still Running Windows 3?

I caught a discussion on the world’s largest buyer of fax machines.

Yes, in 2018, the British National Health Service wear this shameful laurel.

The deeper context was in the mediocre performance of the tax-funded, free-to-all care provider. This time not just in the general case, but specifically when it comes to cancer pathology.

One lady stated that her study revealed machinery used was comparable to any business today still running on Windows 3.

For the happily uninitiated, Microsoft’s desktop operating system was launched way back in 1990. A full five years before the Rolling Stones tune Start Me Up heralded their next major attempt. It wasn’t until seventeen years later that hope emerged for the beleaguered user with the first ever iphone appearance from Apple.

Prospects are not often encountered using dark ages methods. Let alone three decades old tech such as in this pitiful case. Yet enough times they do plough on with ways of doing what you now unleash way easier, quicker, better with approaches ripe for update.

Getting this across though, is not always so straightforward.

This example might just be a gentler path to uncovering where precisely your potential buyer may feel they are on the scale of needy.

In the appropriate place, I can imagine myself saying something along the lines of, ‘ so I see the NHS found they were using lab testing kit equivalent to still being chained to Windows 3 – I sense you’re well beyond that here, whereabouts would you say we’re at today?’

The list of possible responses is wide. Microsoft vs Apple vs Android on one scale. With drill down detail to specific releases. Yet there’s also the Big Data, AI or totally proprietary, left-field prisms.

Wherever they plump for, you’ll get insight into how they judge urgency. Alongside attitudes towards changing or making-do in general.

After all, they’ll either be constrained to using ‘forks in a world of soup’, or unknowingly trying to use an old tool which has been miraculously superseded and now revealed wholly inept for the intended purpose.