Well, there's your problem right there. If you were using it for a few years prior to 2004, that would mean you were running 10.0-10.3. You have to go to 10.4 in 2005 (after you lost your Macs) to get the first truly good version of OS X. And unless you were on a G5, you were using the PPC 7 series, which was seriously showing its age around that time compared to Intel/AMD. Five year-old experiences with Macs are mostly meaningless.
All new computers are loaded with Vista. They’d be better loading legacy Win XP, but you can’t buy it anymore.
The DoD can still load as much XP as it wants under its enterprise licenses.
>>All new computers are loaded with Vista.<<
Ugh. Which by default has IE with ActiveX enabled, unfortunately. Javascript is bad enough.
But, unless you have seen all of their computers, you can’t know what all of them are running, and I would be surprised if some of the servers are not running some form of UNIX.
People can rationalize old versions of OSX all day long. They lost my organization as a customer and will never get us back. We switched to PCs with Win XP and haven’t had 1/100th of the problems. We were stupid enough to flirt with it once and it cost us a lot of money to get out from under the Macintrash. The computers were fine, it was the OS that sucked. Really sucked, to the point of drawing vacuum. The IT contractor made a small fortune off of us and any lead that suggests that we try it again is begging to be fired.
I don’t doubt that DoD could stay with Win XP, but they’re not. They’re going full speed ahead for Vista. I can’t speak for Vista having never even seen it, but I can’t find anybody who has anything good to say about it. #1 complaint: it’s a compatability nightmare.