Full story: The Olympics run on Windows (XP) | Beyond Binary - CNET NewsVANCOUVER, British Columbia--The good news for Microsoft is that all the PCs powering the Olympics are running Windows. The bad news: it's the older Windows XP operating system.
Windows 7, it seems, was a bit too new to be used, while Windows Vista was, well, Windows Vista. So, instead, all the PCs are running an operating system that was first released before the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.
Representatives for Acer confirmed that the more than 6,000 notebooks and desktops that they delivered to Olympic organizers were all running Windows XP.
"It was the operating system requested by VANOC (the Olympic organizing committee) and Atos Origin" (the technology integrator managing the Olympics tech operations), said Todd Olson, who manages Acer's tech work in Vancouver.
Not suprising. Quality assurance for the 6000 XP systems was probably easy to do and it would have taken to many resources to do the QA for the whole network of comps running win7. and all that would have accomplished is saying "Look its windows 7"
Perhaps the most interesting incident came when an Olympics worker got excited during one Olympic event and stood up to cheer, spilling soup all over the laptop. She quickly shut it down and it ended up continuing to work. Acer offered to get the worker a replacement machine, but she decided that if that machine was hearty enough to survive soup, she didn't want to part with it.
Hi there
no surprise really -- a TRIED and TESTED OS which would do the job.
W7 hasn't been really robustly tested "In anger" yet for these types of ONE-OFF events -- but I'd expect it to be in full use for the 2012 London Summer Olympic games.
Just imagine if some glitch had come up with W7 at the Vancouver games -- bad both for the IOC and MS.
Whatever we think of W7 - and hopefully like me you like it too (after all we ARE on a W7 Forum) I think you will probably agree that using XP was the correct decision in this particular case.
Cheers
jimbo
++ I would also add that there are a number of apps that also need to run, and I doubt they had the opportunity to test each of these configurations in Windows 7, so XP was maintained.
Imagine having one app or suite of apps that don't run quite right in 7, this would be bad. I would suspect that most of the IT setup at Vancouver was specced well before the release of 7 (August 2009).
PhreePhly
I agree. Although if they had used W7, it would have been a massive coup for Microsoft. However, they had to be practical, and, with the eyes of the whole world on them, they did the right thing in this instance and used an established OS in the guise of Windows XP that they knew that the required applications could reliably run on. I would expect to see a shift over to W7 for the Summer Olympics here in London in 2012, but I suspect that will depend on the developers of the applications that they use.
Quote