John Rushby pointed out to me that it had been reported that Airbus Hamburg
and Airbus Toulouse were using different versions of CATIA which had
different file formats.

The problems and challenges with using different versions of SW, indeed with
data in different formats, are well-known to software managers (if not 
to almost
everyone who has used a PC and tried to upgrade some favorite SW), and 
Airbus
must have had some measures in place to address those issues. Those 
measures
obviously did not suffice. But choosing the measures is more a 
management issue
than a SW issue.

The Bloomberg News story by Andrea Rothman from September 29 is at
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aSGkIYVa9IZk

and a technical discussion, including some sensible comments about the
situation with company-critical-software updates by Randall S. Newton at
http://aecnews.com/articles/2035.aspx

PBL

-- 
Peter B. Ladkin, Professor of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems,
Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de