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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."
When any manufacturer offers incredibly deep discounts like this, it's only so they can get their hooks into you. "Give them the razors, sell them the blades."
Trolling is a art,
... Berlin is. Berlin has got a population of approximately 4 million, compared to Munich's approximate 1.5.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Anyone want to do the math on this one?
If we assume Linux never existed, and therefore the 90% cut price offer never made, making Munich pay full whack for 14,000 copies of Windows, how much would this cost (on this scale - obviously i doubt they would pay the full ~$300 permachine?)
Or put more directly... how much has this shaved off the MS bottom line for this financial quarter? If anyone knows what the purchase rate for both WINDOWS and OFFICE on this scale... please... let us know the math!
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
Is there anyone out there who mantains a list of countries, cities, companies, &c who have made the move to Linux? If not...well, it would be useful for making Open Source pitches to prospective switch-ers in government, business, and the like. To be sure, Munich isn't alone, but how much company does the city have? I imagine something like one of those push-pin maps, sorted by distro, perhaps, and by the size of the switch (citywide, countrywide, corporate). Would be neat. Does it exist?
Note that it is still a preliminary decision. But as you can read from the article if it comes to the final decision there probably will be 43 (SPD and Gruene party) to 33 (CDU and FDP) votes for Linux. :-)
With OSS they can see the source and verify that it's frre of any backdoor. So they can protect their precious secrets about the Oktoberfest and what Bavarian beer is really made of.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I had the same story submitted, along with a cleaned up translation, but it was rejected.
Anyways, here's the corrected translation, hope it helps.
Alex
Munich City Hall's SPD decides in favour of Linux
In today's meeting, the SPD faction of the Munich City Hall spoke out in
favour of using Linux on the PCs of the city's administration. Thus a
preliminary decision has been made, spokesman Jürgen Bühl said. The Munich
city administration migrates from Windows NT to Linux as the client
operation system and to an office suite from the Open Source domain.
The transition to Linux guarantees greater independence of suppliers and
greater "flexibility in the design of the future IT landscape of the city
administration". Additionally considerably lower cost are created.
Considering the tense budget situation in the states [Bavaria] capital, this
is an aspect that "supplements the strategic-qualitative advantages," says
the note from Munich.
Town councillor Christine Strobl, deputy leaders of the parliamentary group
and SPD spokeswoman in the personal and administrative committee, states:
"At the same time we provide for the further shaping of the technology
location Munich. For development and support the city will purchase
services. Thus we promote high-quality jobs in the region. In this context,
the Technical University of Munich's support during the migration underlines
the outstanding position of the science location Munich."
The migration of the 14,000 PC systems and Notebooks with over 16.000 users
is to take place "gently". In particular departments with extensive
specialized applications are to be able to plan on a long-term basis. The
final decision will be made by the city council in the plenary assembly on
May, 28th. For over one year SPD has held 35 of the 80 seats , the CSU 30,
the Greens 8 and the FDP 3. The other parties account for the remaining four
seats.
"We are fully conscious that our decision has a signal effect", says Strobl.
"That's why we have investigated the matter intensively." The consulting
firm Unilog initially rated the impoved offer from Microsoft as advantagous.
But open questions had remained and finally a new offer of IBM was present.
The new total evaluation of capital value and qualitative-strategic criteria
led to a draw between both solutions, continues the town councillor. As the
combination of Linux and an Open Source office suite
"qualitative-strategically clearly comes out in front, the SPD parliamentary
group decided for this option as the long-term direction".
Heisenberg may have been here
"How many shares shall I sell today?"
This is not an article about just Miscrosoft. It is an article that offers me a faint glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, greedy mega-corps do not control the entire world.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
90% discount?! Now THAT'S a monopoly! I don't see Steve Balmer rushing to offer me a 90% discount on any MS products. Then again I'm not a city so no wonder!
First LinuxTag issues SCO with a cease or desist order, and now this. Godspeed you! Germans.
I wonder if Mr. Ballmer learned how to say Developer in German before he went.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
Deutchland Ousts Windows Alles
Deutchland, Deutchland,
Ousts Windows
In comes Linux
Good and free!
Hear the howling
And the gnashing
From afar
Redmond across the sea!
Deutchland, Deutchland,
Wise technologists
And politicians
who've listened to thee!!
This is selling it below cost, which is dumping, which is illegal. The EU competition commission should take note of this (along with other infractions 1 through 97bn) and throw the book at them.
If it's a lead plated copy of War and Peace, hurled at 1,000 m/sec, all the better.
Beep beep.
14 workstations running Linux is fine, but what's with the significant digits?
Munich will be the first city with over 1 Million inhabitants that is run by Linux
Heise has the story (Babelfish may help you)
Short facts are: The actual vote will occur on wednesday, but the SPD and Green party hold 43 out of 80 seats and have both committed to vote in favour of Linux to be used in the government of Munich, a city of about 2 million inhabitants.
The main reason for the migration was "strategic-quality reasons" and to support competition in software, not cost, which was said to be about the same for Linux and Windows.
About 14000 client computers are involved.
The used distribution will be SuSE, but IBM is also involved. OpenOffice will be used as office suite.
The earlier happenings are also quite exciting:
Anti-Americanism is *everywhere*. I'm posting from your number one ally, the UK, and people here grimace when you mention the US.
Also, millions of people will communicate with their government using OpenOffice formats, which essentially means that OpenOffice will become the "must have" office suite while MS Office will be the redundant "why should I use that when I already have.." Office suite in these regions.
This of course will make it easier for companies to migrate to OpenOffice and possibly Linux themselves.
Ballmer interrupted his skiing trip for a reason. He knows how important such a migration is and that just one large-scale migration is needed to start the landslide.
Went to Germany got owned came back and started selling his MS shares....
You will have to pry my proprietary software $$$ from my cold dead hands!
I think that, rather than anti-americanism, it is a pro-germany stance. How many OS companies are in Germany? How many MS programming jobs are in Germany? How much economic runoff is there going to be in Germany in both scenarios?
If the Germans go with Suse, they have programmers in the country, administrators in the company, technical support in the country. Conversely, should Germany go with Microsoft, they only have administrators.
It just makes sense to go with Suse in this case. The technical barriers can be overcome, and interoperability only comes into play based on install base. You replace the whole load, compatibility problems go the way of the Moose.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
You're not right. Various parts of the German government, especially the federal government, are considering Linux since quite a while. Munich's recent decision is just another step.
The major argument have probably been the high costs of MS systems, which in this case have also been accompanied by a general matching of the open source ideals with the ideals of the current government of Munich (liberal and social).
Oh, and by the way: The decision clearly wasn't driven by anti-Americanism. You can see that because IBM got the assignment, which is, as you know, also an American company.
And just about your opinion that Anti-Americanism was quite big in Germany now: According to a recent poll 70% of all Germans still consider Americans to be their friends (the number didn't change due to the latest events). The Germans just have a different opinion about world policy, that's all.
Kind regards,
Chris
Comment from one sysadmin when MS offered us free software...
Well, anything that stops Balmer dancing about like a happy, sweaty monkey sounds good to me. I'm only surprised Windows scored so highly!
;-)
As an aside, we use Star Office at work on about half the Windows machines, but the people using it do seem to be envious of the staff with MS Office installed. Problems with printing multi-page spreadsheets/images, problems opening files etc, and lack of speed seem the biggest problems.
Although, since the sales/service people are still mostly using PIIs with 64-128MB of RAM, it's little wonder. I recently built OpenOffice on my Gentoo box to see how it compared, and it does seem a lot faster, even though my Gentoo machine has a slower CPU (Athlon 1.4ghz) than my office machine (2.4ghz P4 - although the office machine has a shit SiS onboard graphic chipset).
I doubt the management would like all the PCs building OO from source for 3 days though
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Microsoft has actually learned a lot over the past decade; particularly in the area or recurring revenue streams.
At this point a significant portion of the company revenues are derived from subscription services. Even if they waive all future upgrade license fees, they still have support contracts, MSDN and other subscriptions to services many large organizations will rerquire. It'll be vary interestingto see what Balmer is willing to offer to get this contract/deployment. There has got to be a point below which they will refuse to go. 'Under no circumstances, loose to linux' must have a limit. I just wonder where it actually is.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Under the Munich government's scoring system, one would generally expect scores around 6000, based on the extremely popular Novell system they had running for many years before they decided to "upgrade" to Windows after being given the hard-sell by MS. To score 6218 shows that Linux is well ahead of the curve; I believe that when they looked at a Solaris installation a couple of years ago, that managed slightly lower at about 6100 (I forget the exact number, but it was somewhere around that).
The most interesting figure is Windows at 5293. AFAIK, that is the lowest score they've ever given out. Certainly the lowest one I've seen that they published.
Go Linux!
several reasons:
to strengthen the 'technological capital' thing
free is still cheaper than 90% off, which is important in the current german economy. also, most of the cost that does exist will stay inside munich, instead of giving a foreign company the money
it creates 'real competition'
it gives greater flexibility
the change will create jobs for qualified people (which means more off them come to munich)
not dependent on a single company
Once you are used to multiple desktops (no, that measly 4 add-on powertoys desktops don't count.), Unix-style copy-paste and much greater flexibility and configurability, you will never go back to Windows.
Sorry, but the only area where I found Windows to be better than KDE/Linux is gaming. And that's only because there are too few games, not because of any technical limitations.
Also, the roots of this decision lie long before the Iraq war.
...Microsoft is removing Munich from its next version of Flight Simulator.
just some thoughts on the situation...
first, it's been said before that by going w/ Linux it will help the German economy more than by going with windows.
second, 90% is a great rebate discount. But what happens 5 years down the road when MS decides to not support the piece of software that they have already sold and instead tells the people of Munich that they have to buy new versions of the software at full price?
Third, this is a good way to bring Linux to people's homes. Didn't the x86 processor (and subsequent MS OS) become popular due to the fact that it was all over the workplace and people wanted to use it at home? not exactly like that but i hope you get my thought.
and just so people don't think i'm some Linux zealot, i use winxp and beos. i've tried several distributions of Linux and don't like it... yet. As more people use it, it will definitely get much better for home use.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
It's pitty, because it finally improved (not perfected though) its operating system that can be considered stable now. But, its too late for most of the people I know. I can tell that ALL science related machines (PCs) we have today use Linux instead of Windows both here in our department and in the part of the Los Alamos National lab. I know, and I'm proud that I was one of the few who started using it, and probably had some effect on this move.
On the other hand Linux is not suitable for everything. I need a decent/mature interface and a machine which requires little maintanence at home, at which point I picked MacOS X instead of Microsoft because of the past experience. Which works pretty well for what it's supposed to do and more... So, again Microsoft lost one more individual as a customer. That's the primary term for Microsoft, instead of the user.
Compatition is good. Now, they improved their products significantly (we must be fair!), and they're trying to reduce their cost, at least, the initial cost. That's also an improvement. Let's be naive and wish that it's not a trick to tie the costomers to rip them later. Actually, that's exactly the pshycological behaviour of most people when the Microsoft is involved. We do NOT trust them anymore...
I do not wish that Microsoft disappears forever, but just wish that it can understand what they did wrong in the past, and try to repair the damage they did. However, it does not seem what is happening here.
In the Heise article, the rebate offered by Ballmer is not specified. In fact, the details of the offer seem to be secret. The 90% number seems to originate from earlier discussions (not linked to Munich) about an internal Microsoft order not to lose to Linux at any cost.
Before the war, there was an article on how the US was spying on countries to see how they would vote on the war resolution in the UN.
5 936,00.html
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,90
Because of this Germany may also be moving away from software that may have potential secret backdoors written in for the NSA. No matter how much you get in rebates, it will never give a government the peace of mind of having compiled and inspected the code yourself.
Your message is somewhat nonsensical -
1. The slashdot community does NOT hate microsoft. Since the the slashdot community is composed chiefly of users of microsoft windows, your statement makes no sense.
2. When microsoft does badly, the "entire tech industry" does not do badly, quite the contrary. Those who depend on microsoft stock do badly - period. "the industry" is actually much better off if software companies are able to freely innovate without the fear that the 1300 lb gorilla is going to smash them with monoploy hardball tricks.
3. The mainstream adoption of open source does not mean fewer jobs for programmers, but quite the opposite - what on earth gives you that idea? open source opens up many more opportunities for programmers.
Being a programmer, I find this delightful!
When the winning software basicly scores 6/10 and beats out a competitor scoring 5/10, what does this say about the suitability of current software for what users want to use it for?
Yes I know it's fun to watch linux vs windows and cheer from the sidelines etc, but how about this bigger picture?
Maybe it's just me but software seems to be doing less and less of what we as users want and more and more of what marketing departments want. Useless features, obsolete features that are never pruned, tons of time and money spent dealing with ways to push advertising or find more ways to milk the consumer... Whatever happened to looking for ways to make doing everyday tasks easier and faster? Open source projects don't seem to be entirely immune to it either. I see lots of development in trying to keep feature parity or adding new things to invent new buzzwords for, but I haven't seen anything moving towards ease of using for some time now. All apps are now using "skinable" interfaces that make using them inconsistent with each other. Some apps have such complex configurations they're harder to learn to use than the average OS. I think that's a problem.
So what were the almost 4000 points that weren't awarded based on?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Or better yet, actually use those nice facilities built into CSS2 for that kind of internationalisation. Of course that would make the site not work properly in IE (which doesn't support that part of the CSS spec) but hey, no one cares about a few MS users, right?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Attacking France and making them do all the typing," garnered 7012 points, until someone pointed out the German constitution forbids it.
I would have thought Mexico City has a stronger claim to this title.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
No, that's not true. A couple of other cities running Linux:
By the way, a lot is happening in developing countries. On May 22nd, I had the opportunity to attend the publication seminar of the interesting Free as in Education research report by Niranjan Rajani, sponsored by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Other writers published in the study are Cesar Brod (Brazil), Frederick Noronha (India) and Nico Coetzee (South Africa). Also attending the seminar, among many others, was Edgar Villanueva (Congressman, Peru), who sent the famous response letter to Microsoft, giving a talk on "Legal and Other Experiences in Promoting FLOSS in Peru".
But cities are not the only ones interested in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), of course. For example, what do you like the government of South Africa open source software web site at http://www.oss.gov.za/? Their Government OSS Strategy Document (in PDF format) could be interesting reading.
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