Obama team's IT issues could have been worse

Stephen Withers
Friday, 23 January 2009 12:53

Opinion and Analysis

So President Barack Obama's White House staff say they are struggling with old software. Things would have been worse if the Bush administration had kept up to date.

Various reports have suggested that some members of the new White House staff are struggling with the IT setup they have inherited.

For example, the Washington Post's Anne E Kornblut wrote "The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software."

That most likely means that we're talking about Windows XP and Office 2003.

Frankly, they should consider themselves lucky.

If the White House had already updated to Office 2007, the new staffers would be struggling much more to adapt to the different software.

The menu structures of Office 2008 for Mac (or the previous 2004 edition) more closely resemble Office 2003 for Windows than 2007, with its new-style Ribbon interface.

The Ribbon has its advocates, but it does take some getting used to. Old habits die hard, especially when it comes to menus. (I'm still getting used to Entourage's Source command moving to the Message menu!)

So I reckon the new staff at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should be relatively pleased to find older Windows software.

Unless, that is, they're used to iWork and other Apple software. And given Kornblut's observation that "The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos", that seems quite possible.