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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.
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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.