Someone needs to do a study showing how the constant necessity to upgrade software leads to lost productivity in the workplace. As network administrators, we are constantly faced with the pressure to maintain current versions of all licensed software in our organizations. Not only are network admins burdened with the task of having to purchase and deploy upgrades, but also our end users are losing time re-learning software packages they were already proficient at in previous versions. Example:Last Summer we upgraded all of our workstations to MSO2K Pro. Now we see that XP is on the horizon. Do we upgrade or not? If we don’t upgrade then our users are happy with a package they are familiar with, but are frustrated because they can’t open documents sent to them from users of the new version. If we do upgrade then our users complain about how they can’t do tasks they could quickly do in the previous version, and, of course, we have to work through the ‘bug’ cycle inherent in new software releases. The question is, is there any compelling reason to spend the time and money, and sacrifice the loss of productivity, for upgrades and new releases of software that replace versions that work just fine? In other words, is there enough new functionality built into the next version to justify the expense of deploying it, or are we ultimately wasting our efforts on a lot of software ‘fluff’? I say we end up sacrificing a huge amount of resources and end up not getting much in return for the effort.