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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.'"
That's the way it is now and Closed Source wins everytime.
Maybe you'd prefer to explain why your application suite doesn't support some feature that Microsoft Office does.
But I guess convincing government to use the substandard solution is par for the course.
Microsoft must make money to pay for marketing, sales, developers, accountants, lawyers and support. This cost isn't insignificant.
And Red Hat, must make money to pay for marketing, sales, accountants, lawyers and limited support. This cost isn't insignificant.
Note that the only people not getting paid in open source are the techies. The developers and to a lesser degree the more technical support staff are conned into doing charity work to pay for the Porsches of the non-geeks. All profits go to the non-technical people almost in directly inverse proportion to their tech skills. At least in the commercial world, somebody besides the PHBs gets a cut.
It's mind-boggling that a group of self-proclaimed geeks would promote a system that ends up as yet another reward system for the technically incompetent. Does somebody think that marketing and managers aren't getting their fair share and geeks are just too well rewarded?