Microsoft Loses Showdown in Houston

An anonymous reader writes "It seems the city of Houston has decided against using Microsoft software. It really is amazing how much it costs to use (and maintain) software. I can't help but wonder if this will become a trend." Turns out they decided on the relativly unknown SimDesk suite, which has nothing to do with The Sims, sadly. Many, many posts about this. In additional news seldo writes "There's an interesting interview on News.Com with Peter Houston. He discusses Microsoft's changing attitude in competing with Linux -- no longer calling it a "cancer" but instead promoting the advantages of Windows."

Comments

Some Truth in Peter Houston

[4of12]

I found the last comment in his interview interesting:

Q: What's the potential risk for Microsoft in all of this?
A: The challenge will come if customers start rejecting the proposition that there is value in integration.

"Integration" is the lever that MS uses to generate revenue. Customers are becoming increasingly aware of this and are assessing its value as best they can (given that they've lived in the MS Matrix monoculture for so long.)

Quoting from the Financial Times article that is another Slashdot story, too,

For many users the software question simply comes down to money. To Paul Friday, head of IT for the West Yorkshire Police, using Linux is not a statement against Microsoft but a way to save money. ."No one has ever worked out what it really costs [to run Windows]. There was never a real alternative; you just did it."

Re:Funny enough, this will be good for MS users to

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it. For the first time in a decade, what with all the city and national governments giving the dirty bird to Microsoft in favor of Linux or other alternatives, Redmond has finally realized that it has real competition again.

Unfortunately I have to post this as an AC but I'm speaking as one of the top geeks in a large place of work (~6,000 employees). We're not upgrading to XP and we're tesing a large group of people (~200) on Linux and OpenOffice on machines we've had in storage for a year. Thus far there have been no real technical problems although the user education has been a bit of work. Once they are familiar with an X desktop they spend most of their time using email and "Office" anyhow.
We love it, we love the price and we love the excellent support we get from newsgroups and FAQs/docs.

Re:Funny enough, this will be good for MS users to

[October_30th]

Ok. Sounds good, but what will happen when your ~200 Linux/OpenOffice people will have to communicate with the outside world (clients?) who use MS Office exclusively?

I've run into OpenOfficeMS Office export and import problems even with plain Word letters, so I can't imagine a complex spreadsheet with macros will work very well.

Well, we here in Houston don't like it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Working for the houston civic authority doing IT support, I can tell you that many of us are severly displeased with this decision. It boiled down to the 'old boy' network whent he choice was made for SimDesk, and many of us openly suspect a rash of kickbacks in this lowball bid win.

Almost all of us are MS certified types (I have my MCSE), and a few of us use linux at home or as web servers for some of our intranet infrastructure. The running gag is that the change over in hardware in terms of on site servers and bandwith enhancements will cost us more than three times our current agreement with MS for our existing systems. MS had lowballed too, offering us a very attractive licensing and support package that was not only reasonable (by MS standards), but significantly less than their 'going rate' packages.

Alternatives in using pure *nix were also presented, some rather attractive on the face of it, but ultimately they were rejected for training and hardware costs, as well as for the fact that they are not very well known or supported in the kind of environment we have going on here in Houston. Over half of our PCs would have had some kind of driver problem, more than 2/3rds of our existing software and DB systems would have been rendered incompatible, an worse still there were no alternatives for some of our vital statistics and infrastructure support apps. A wash.

This whole thing has us more than a little upset, and some of us laughing as we learn more about SimDesk. It's bandwith intensive, and many of our outlying and important network nodes are on less than a typical home broadband connection (with up to 50 user machines and servers!).

Don't believe everything you read... it wasn't a rejection of MS because it is MS, but rather an old boy deal done by friends and mutal friends.

Re:OSS software?

[ward]

> I think this is just a case of price. The city of > Houston got a great deal from a Houston based
> company. What's it called when a city practices
> nepotism, except without the relatives? Oh yeah,
> politics. ;)

I'd say that it's just a case of a city supporting its own entrepreneurs, supporting its own tax generating companies, supporting its own residents.

It's like buying from your neighborhood hardware store, grocery store, or five and dime. Oh wait, they're all national chains now... Looks like folks didn't shop there enough to keep them alive.

As a Houstonian, I'm glad to see a Houston business getting support from the city.

Background of SimDesk

[DeepRedux]

The Chairman and CEO of SimDesk, Mr. Waters, is "responsible for the strategic direction and management of SimDesk".

Mr Waters was founding chairman and CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries, Inc. (BFI) and served BFI from 1969 until 1997, when BFI was sold to Allied Waste for $9 billion in cash. During the 1980s, BFI pleaded guilty to charges of price fixing. More details:

In 1987, a group of commercial business customers filed a national class action lawsuit against Houston, Texas-based BFI and Oak Brook, Illinois-based WMI, alleging the highest echelons of both companies had orchestrated a nationwide price-fixing conspiracy. In one important document, the business customers detailed a number of antitrust cases across the nation and the involvement of key corporate officers from both firms. In 1990, both firms agreed to settle the case for a total of $50 million plus $13 million in attorneys fees, while denying any wrongdoing. All evidence in the case, including some "4 million pages of documents," was sealed.

They would seem to have the makings of a worthy successor to Microsoft.