Saturday September 20, 2003 - [ 08:08 AM GMT ] Topic - Business - by Jeff Childers - Corporate IT budgets have become paralyzed by their resistance to monolithic, all-or-nothing upgrades accompanied by painful services interruptions and unexpected cost overruns. Their obstinacy has been learned by hard experience, and is caused by the near ubiquitous use of Microsoft software in business. Microsoft has engineered its software to create just this interdependency. The result is the phenomenon of "cascading" upgrades, where the decision to upgrade a single Microsoft component triggers an avalanche of related upgrade requirements. Consider the following example: A...