Jason Dodson wrote:

> I used to have the same opinion as you... that is until I got a government contract (can't go into too many details). It was 2002 and all but one
> machine in the whole building was running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Developer tools were close to impossible to find, let alone, it is NOT a good
> platform for... well, anything. They demanded that we not touch their setup. After about 9 months of work and no end in sight, they marked the problem
> up to incompotence and started fishing for other people to fulfill the contract. Needless to say, no one would touch it. In the end, they upgraded
> their machines and OS's to Windows 2000. The project took 3 weeks to complete, written from scratch.
>
> The customer is NOT always right. If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't need to hire you.
>

I agree.

The average user wants to get its job done, so he does not care about
platform issues until the platform gets in the way of him getting his
job done. I always inform the user the advantages and disadvantages of
his choices and always explain him that keeping up with the platform
improvements brings less trouble overall.

If you accept any condition from the user you have to tell him your
solution is not the best possible and what the problems are. I always
prefer an informed user so they don't bitch at me when something goes wrong.