Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Audits UK Council To Prove Cost Effectiveness
A Masquerade writes "When Microsoft's market position was threatened by projects within the UK government evaluating open source solutions, it chose an interesting way to fight back. Computer Weekly has a piece by a Microsoft manager explaining they're paying for an external audit of the IT services for a specific UK local authority, Newham Council, to provide a cost justification for Windows and Office on the desktop, as opposed to an open source solution. The Register comments that 'if Microsoft succeeds in holding on to Newham, it will have knocked a considerable amount of wind out of the pilot schemes before they've even kicked off properly.'"
So Microsoft pays up for the audit and they got to choose the place the audit takes place.
Is Newham some kind of poster-boy location for Microsoft? I mean hey, hell would freeze over if this "audit" shows anything than a clear advantage in costeffectivness for Windows.
Though a shrewd move by Microsoft it may prove effective. Since it is very difficult to counter such move by open source. One solution would be that the local open source users groups can prove it to them that open source solution would work out cheaper. any other ideas??
My local authority caused a stink when it bought expensive laptops for all the councillors - because it was later suggested that these machines were hardly ever used. Small example, but such is local politics.
Also, and I mean no disrepect to anyone in local government IT in the UK, but it's not well paid compared to the private sector - there are plenty of PHBs I guess.
Machines at my organisation (can't say for obvious reasons) were recently upgraded from Windows NT to Windows 2000, and Windows 2000 takes around three minutes to boot up on a Celeron 500 with 128 Mb of RAM. Windows NT on th eother hand takes around 20 seconds. And at 6 UK pounds an hour that adds up after a while. Mandrake 9.2 is the fastest booting linux I have used so far, which is faster than Windows NT so hopefully I can convince them to switch (It has all the apps we need, and I don't have any LG drives either).
When choosing an MS solution you pay your money to MS. If you choose an open alternative you are more or less able to choose to whom you want to give your money. You could pay RedHat or some other distributor or you could employ the people on site (and even fight unemployment that way...)
Using phrases like "shareware Linux" and "kernel level programming in VB" plus stating that Linux doesn't have features that it patently does, demonstrates more than adequately that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Shame on you for calling yourself a "consultant". You're an MS weenie, pure and simple.
If you really want to compete, you have to explain how a closed file format that changes every 18 months is a good thing. That will take some serious explaining, or serious bribing. Particularly in government.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
but how do you think this is going to end up? Of course MS is going to be shown to be more cost effective as all they have to do is lower the cost of licenses and then make some noise about TOC.
Of course it doesn't matter that the people who are in local goverment already know open source solutions so support wouldn't change a huge amount but at the end of the day we all know how this is going to go. I would like to be surprised but I somehow don't think I will be
How can the people doing the audit really be truely independent if paid by the larget commerical software house in the world?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
An IT supplier paying for an independant IT audit? The chances of such an audit saying anything but Microsoft is cheaper is like research by the Dr. Pepper makers stating that actually Coca-Cola does actually taste better than their drink.
What's going on here does matter.
Local councils in Great Britain are not IT innovators. They are deeply conservative (small C, sadly) bodies whose IT directors are terrified of appearing on television or in the press with projects which have failed. Hell, some of them only recently stopped doing their word processing on green screens attached to their mainframes.
They have now arrived at the "nobody got sacked for buying Microsoft" mindset, and the elected members who they serve are as nervy about IT projects as their IT staff. They are happy to tip loads of local taxpayers' money into Microsoft because that's what everybody else is doing, and there's no safe alternative. This, well, fear, uncertainty and doubt guides IT procurement in Microsoft's favour. But for cash strapped councils, the attraction of leaving Microsoft behind is great - the money saved could go directly into local services (most likely some pet project which would be a waste of money, but I digress).
So the emerging possibility of basing council desktop IT around free software causes mixed feelings in these people - if they save lots of money they will be heroes, but if the project crashes and burns they will be zeroes. They have done a good job so far of scaring IT directors into thinking that they are taking a big risk going with non MS software: now they are addressing the other part of the equation, and demonstrating that there won't be a big saving.
It doesn't matter that the study is rigged and being paid for by MS: "The Newham Study" will be often quoted as a "professional" study by CGEY, who are a tier 1 player in local council outsourcing in GB.
The question is, can the study be neutered? Sadly this is unlikely as it will be printed on glossy paper and widely circulated. The best outcome is that there will be another study showing a different outcome, so the viewpoint on cost savings will be "mixed".
This is precisely why MadHatter is so significant: Sun are trying to still show major cost savings (though not as much as using a generic free software stack), while reducing or eliminating the possibility of the project crashing and burning.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
A company based on being productive...
Every company is based on "being productive". You can be productive in Linux just as easily as in Windows.
This is the government. If they get Word documents they can't open or something, they can just tell people to use RTF. What are the customers going to do - go to a competing government?
In Munich they offered discounts (although still failed), now this... If it isn't anti-competition I don't know what is.
MS offering a discount in response to not being chosen is, in fact, a prime exame of competition. It is competition at work. Whether it is 'secret' or not is immaterial.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
I live in Hackney, the next borough over and was wondering how many of the slashdot crew are in the area.
Is there an opportunity to add some consultancy assistance to Newham council e.g. a document containing all the points that should be examined in a fair audit, so that they can do a comparison with what CGEY come up with?
Something that lists:
Training (Users and Admin)
Hardware upgrades needed vs reuse of hardware
Cost of software
Cost of deployment of applications
etc.
Anyone have something that Sir Welsh could hand over to his IT monkey?
- Sredni
Also it is important to remember that if your requirements is something like a "windows+office" sorta of thing, all you need is a few clicks default instalation of almost any linux dist.
Any person that is compeent enougth to install windows to a clean machine is able to that. Is not that hard.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
I want to see an unbiased proof
That's what we all want to see.
The problem is that there is really nobody unbiased to do this type of analisys.
You have pro-Microsoft (including themselves), Free Software zealots, and normal people.
Obviously, pro-Microsoft peeps will always interpret and flip data to make it look like it's by far the best option.
Obviously, Free Software zealots will favour Free Software although their reports tend to be more realistic due to the fact there usually isn't "the collective" ensuring that it has to be ridiculously favourable.
Then there's everday, normal peeps. They quite simply don't care. Microsoft software, for all it's problems, gets the job done and is familiar. Moving to Free Software may solve many problems, but the move itself will be months (or even years) of hassle and the new software initially unfamiliar. It may be cheaper but, hell, so is cycling into work.
Before you can get decent reports you need interested people who are genuinely impartial. How many of them are there in the IT world?
Anyway, that's my ANALisys of the situation.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
The pilot project is designed to find out to what degree open source things might work. This is not an ethical or an anti-microsoft statement, it is merely an economical item on the agenda. If Microsoft - even if it is just for this county - drops their prices to below whatever the OC community can deliver, the council will be happy: It all comes down to money.
It is sad that Microsoft would stoop to the level of sabotaging a pilot project like this, but at the same time, it has to be admitted that there are several other factors to discuss. for one thing, efficiency: People who work in councils are usually older than the average population, and often have some problems with technology. I know of several people in my local council who reluctantly learned how to use Word isntead of a pencil, and who would scream murder if they would have to learn a new programme.
It is a difficult matter.
The Mini Repository - more links
People that support and promote FLOSS very often loose sifgt of the most important characteristic of this kind of software: transparency, accountability (specially when software is GPLed) and avoiding to be locked in by software providers.
I would not care about paying twice as much for an open solution if after a few years my institution is sued for millions because a watchdog comes and finds impossible to audit our internal procedures.
Or after some years come a propietary company and changes the licensing schemes (because that is what is in their interest, not mine) and I am forced to pay extra money that was not in my budget.
Or waht about the propietary software company decides that my version of X program is not going to be supported enymore and all my main processes are using that software perfectly fine and I would prefer to rather no upgrade or migrate to the latest and shiniest?
MS will emphasize the TCO when they can put forwad cases in which it would appear MS stuff is cheaper. Well, at this stage of the game TCO is a red herring, since there are many other considerations far more important, specially for democratically elected bodies, I would glance at such study and ingonre it it completely since closed source software companies are to be considered only as a very last desperate resource.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Ernst & Young are hardly going to say that Microsoft has a more expensive TCO when their own organisation runs on Microsoft products.
That would be like telling all their customers that they use a more expensive solution regardless of the facts.
They will produce a report which says that open source is cheaper in some irrelevent areas but that Microsoft products have a clear advantage where it counts.
Why would pcAnywhere be need since it already has remote desktop? For support needs, that's all that is needed. You're other points are well taken and spot on.
Of course, the obvious is, with a MS solution, you have to toss in rougly $500 - $100,000 in extra charges to compare to what you get free with OS. Why the huge range? Well, it depends on what the machine is going to be doing. Just imagine all of the free software you get with OS and then imagine all of the fees and extra support charges you would have to pay if you went with a MS solution.
Then, they need to figure out and add in the rising cost of MS software. They have plenty of trend data. What is the projected cost when it's time to renew? We all know, based on trends, it will only get more expensive. Remember, this is a recurring cost and the window will continue to get smaller if MS has anything to do with this. With OS, there is no recurring cost, other than test and deployment. Both of which, would have to be done with even a MS solution. So, it can be safely ignored or weigh equally on both camps.
Add in the cost of fighting viruses and trojans, and the fact that you have to have more MS admins than Linux admins, it quickly looks very poorly for MS from a TCO perspective.
It would be impossible for any *properly performed* TCO comparison to indicate a lower TCO with Windows. The sole exception would be if the machine uses are very, very meager and they never plan to upgrade their systems. Even then, it would be pretty iffy.
Charging artificially inflated prices accross the board to subsidize anti-competitive discounts to customers considering switching is completely consistent with a monopoly.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Spot on. If software becomes a cookie-cutter affair then I lose my biggest advantage over the folks in India. I am available, on site, and can create software that fits the business precisely. Free Software gives me the ability to create custom standards-based applications that are at a price that is comparable to the one-size-fits all variants that the big software companies are selling.
Despite being a Linux user, I have mellowed over the past few years and I really don't care what an organization uses. If it gets the job done, so be it. My issue (both at home and in the corporate world) is being able to share data. As long as I can read the document, data file, database, spreadsheet, etc, using the tools of my choice and provide that data to my peers in the formats they need it in, what one uses to make use of the data is largely irrelevant. It isn't a Microsoft vs. Linux debate.
In government, the public has the right be able to access their data freely and fairly. Corporations can impose limits on the tools used to access its data (i.e. everyone must use IE on the Intranet). In the public domain, cost is secondary to interoperability. You cannot dictate to the public that every MUST use IE or they are out of luck in dealing with the government. They must support all, IMHO, at least 95% of the populace. That means supporting IE, Mozilla, Linux, Opera and Mac users, to name a few. And it isn't hard, kids. Just don't use browser specific extensions.
Use commonly available formats. Use HTML, PDF, XML. Offer documents in MS Word, StarOffice/OpenOffice (SXW), ASCII text, RTF and XML formats, to name a few. Offer data in CSV, text and XML formats. Do that and the public can choose their favorite tools, be it Windows, UNIX or Linux. Governments have a civic duty to do this if they want to offer their data electronically to the public-at-large.
Microsoft's true crime is the control of file formats. Break that one monopoly and their Windows desktop monopoly will start to come apart. Education eventually triumphs over ignorance. That one ruling in the antitrust suit could've changed the world. Break their lock on the data and the rest of their business won't be able to compete except on merit.
I use OpenOffice on Windows daily for document production despite the fact I have Office installed. Just personal preference. Only my immediate co-workers know the documents aren't being produced by Office. The rest of the business couldn't care less. As long as the data is transparent and sharable, the world doesn't care how it gets produced and prcessed. That has always been the key in the enterprise and should be priority one for any e-government initiative. Run whatever you want, just make sure anyone and everyone can make use of it with the tools of their choice.
Know why Ford doesn't offer 70% discounts to people considering a Chevy? Because they CAN'T. Their profit margin isn't that inflated in the first place. The main problem with monopolies is that they can charge whatever they want and people have to pay. No competitive business has 70% profit margins, like MS does.
They will also leave out long-term costs that arise from their market dominance and their ability to control their customers. As we all know, you don't pay just once for MS products; you pay again and again and again, just as frequently as Microsoft decides you should. If not for the open-source alternatives, things would be considerably worse for all of the MS shops out there, so they should at least be grateful that the alternative exists, whether they might consider making the leap or not.
It's a little beyond me why anyone on principle would prefer closed to open source software. Even if you'll never look at (or understand) the code yourself, others certainly will. This in itself guarantees that the software will continue to serve - and not manipulate - its users. It is a Good Thing to know verifiably that the software you are using is not really serving another master or out-right screwing you behind the scenes. Governments and corporations should seriously consider open-source solutions on this point alone.
The Microsoft-vs-Linux debate is only partly about short-term costs. Maybe the bigger issue is whether you feel more comfortable in a regime of centralized or distributed power. The MS partisans aren't merely reluctant to learn new tricks, as some have said here. They are also greatly disturbed by a world with no central, monolithic, and hopefully benevolent authority that they can (wisely or foolishly) trust without question. Most of the FUD we see comes precisely from that dark, scary place.
Drug companies aren't competitive, either. For the same reasons, basically.
The difference is that drug companies have the FDA to help keep their monopoly status, while Microsoft has no such gift.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Because the linux community, in all it's approaches to the desktop, has been focused on the systems administrator experience, not the end user experience, as the example above excellently illustrates.
The real value of a comptuer is in how easy and efficiently the end user (not the support person) can get work done minus the cost of work that (mostly the UI) prevents the user from doing. When you get down to it, Windows support and licenses cost nothing compared to the monetary value of the work done with it.
And no, I'm not cheering on Microsoft, I'm lamenting that the Linux community can't advance and think outside of the server box.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Don't you know what "profit margin" means? The cost of advertising, developing software, etc. is why MS's 2002 OS profit margin was "only" 86%, instead of 100%. The profit is what's left over after you pay expenses.
Knowing the way that local government works, my worry with this Newham situation is that it may just be a ploy to get cheap software from MS and that, in exchange for a big discount
Pray tell me, what exactly is wrong with Newham council getting a "big discount" from Microsoft as you put it, and saving taxpayers money?
As someone who lived in Pliastow and payed heavy taxes to Newham Council, I will have nothing but admiration for Newham council if they got some discount from Micrsoft or got the best TCO that they can by chosing Microsoft software and saving the long suffering tax payers of Newham some money for a change instead of wasting tax payers'hard earned money all the time!
Why on earth should people pay more taxes just because some loony left crazies at the council hate America or hate Microsoft?
Newham is NOT Munich, where they actually paid to the tune of $10 MORE for a Suse Linux solution than the offer Microsoft made to them.
This blatant disregard for the interest of taxpayers and an eagerness to score cheap political points, might go a long way towards explaning why German unemployment is now running at nearly TWICE the rate of that in the USA and the German economy has been going nowhere for the past 10 years!