The Australian Taxation Office is planning to move to Windows 7

Mar 14, 2013 13:14 GMT  ·  By

While Microsoft urges everyone to dump Windows XP and move to Windows 7 or 8 as soon as possible, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is still using the 11-year-old operating system and Internet Explorer 6.

It does plan to upgrade to Windows 7 at some point, but the transition to a newer OS is yet to begin, CRN writes. According to the official schedule, the first computers will get Windows 7 and Office 2010 in November, while a group of 200 employees will test-drive the new solutions starting with May.

“We could not risk undertaking a rollout in early 2013 that may impact on tax time 2013,” an ATO spokesperson said. “As part of the contingencies in our planning the decision was taken to move the rollout till after tax time peak processing had ended.”

This isn’t quite good news for Microsoft, not only because so many users are actually delaying the transition process, but also due to the fact that most of them are planning to move to Windows 7 instead of 8.