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.'"

Comments

Newham?

[KillerLoop]

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.

Re:This is what we all want.

[Deusy]

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.

Who cares about TCO?

[jotaeleemeese]

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.