This evening, a co-worker came and told me about some static he was getting for wanting to upgrade an application he was working on from .NET 1.1 to 2.0. The first thing that popped into my mind was something someone told me when I first went to work at Ciber:

My boss was this brilliant guy named Josh and we were discussing why I should upgrade to XP (this was 2002.) I was against it. Windows 2000 Server worked great. I could create multiple web sites in IIS 5.0. I could do this, do that, it was more stable, faster, etc.

Then we went back to my desk and he showed me something like this:

He didn't have to follow the visual with, "So...you like having that many patches applied to your computer?", but he did.

General purpose computer software generally improves over time. You can take the improvements in the form of a bunch of little Band-Aid patches that you might not have applied right, or in the form of an upgrade. With an upgrade you run the risk of having to deal with an unexpected change.

But let's face it: you were going to have to deal with that change eventually anyway, unless you don't plan on sticking around very long. Taking the upgrade, finding what's broken, is inevitable.