Munich Spurns Steve Ballmer's Software Rebates

Kurt Pfeifle writes "Steve Ballmer's recent trip to Munich to offer up to 90% rebates for the Microsoft Software Assurance and Licenses was in vain. The ruling party of Germans biggest city and self-proclaimed 'technology capital' now decided to migrate 14.000 workstations to Linux and an OSS office suite. A study comparing the alternatives had assigned 6218 (out of 10.000) points to Linux/OSS, while the MS Windows platform only scored 5293. Babelfish translation of the latest newsticker story."

Comments

they should have taken windows

[rusko]

at that rate, they should have taken windows. i lub linux and all, but the maintenance costs are going to go through the roof on that one.

with that said, munich is not known to be the 'technology capital' of germany as they claim, but rather as the 'white beer capital' =]

all the same, im glad it went the way it did. although the discounted deal on bloze is imho better, i feel they decided on principle this time, recognizing that although a deep discount may have been advantageous short-term, they would end up paying out of their ass for it long-term because of verndor lock-in.

paul

14.000 Workstations? Big Deal.

[rjamestaylor]

In my home office environment I have 12 workstations (no fraction needed). When I switched from pirated^Wre-used copies of MS Office to OpenOffice.org nobody from Microsoft called, nobody wrote a press release proclaiming that "12.000 workstations" were converted from Windows to a single instance of Gentoo shared from a single server. Why do the Germans get all the press??

_