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

This is what we all want.

[bl1st3r]

I want to see an unbiased proof that "MS IS SO MUCH CHEAPER" like they keep ranting about. If it actually proves they are, I want it HEAVILY documented. This could be the deciding factor to stop hating MS's apparent FUD tactics. They might really be more cost effective than Linux and other Open Source solutions...

*cough* if you tack on the 699$ SCO tax *cough* ;)

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.

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:Newham?

[Builder]

Newham is actually quite an open-minded borough, well at least as far as their IT services team go. They have been quite instrumental in pioneering new IT technologies including Open Source solutions in the UK, and many other boroughs look to them for guidance.

Pity they're also the leaders in deployment of citizen surveilance solutions as well, and many other boroughs look to them for guidance on that too.

Here's

[Pingular]

the original article about the 'UK test(ing) open source waters'.
Paticularly of interest is this: 'We can be sure that there will be lots of meetings going on inside Microsoft, because that is just what happened when the German city of Munich decided to use open source software in preference to Windows. The result was a secret offer of massive discounts.'
In Munich they offered discounts (although still failed), now this... If it isn't anti-competition I don't know what is.

The only way to win, really

[Dancin_Santa]

If you want to compete with Free Software, the only way you can truly compete is at the cost of use level. As far as operating systems and application suites go, the alternatives are all pretty much equal.

But once you take the fight to cost, the winners and losers get separated right quick. Mac, out. Linux, in. AIX, out. Windows, in. Solaris, way out. HPUX, out. Herd, it's almost there, any day now.

And so with the finalists Linux and Windows you have a neck and neck race. Linux wins in the licensing part, but Windows wins out in the cost of use. The total TCO is pretty much equal, so it's really a toss up at this point.

It may seem like a huge win for Microsoft if they can pull this TCO win off, but it's only one government department and the reality of the situation is that every office is different and has different needs. A company based on hacking and running high-powered servers needs Linux. A company based on being productive and interfacing with customers and customer data needs Windows.

So you can't judge the fitness of an OS on TCO alone, especially as TCO is variable among application domains.

Re:The only way to win, really

[malsdavis]

Why is the cost of use less for windows?

I study at a university in the UK where they have a lab full of about 600 Linux desktop PCs, in a lab down the hall there are about 100 Windows XP pc's.

Being quite friednly with the support staff I have on a couple of occasions asked them whether they prefer Linux or Windows and they ALL say that the 100 Windows PC's take up about 80% of their time and the 600 Linux comps only about 10% of there time (the other 10% is persumably spent doing what IT support staff do best ...sitting about whinging about dumb newbies).

From personal experience I have never once had a single small prob with any of the Linux computers ...wish I could say the same about my WinXP computer at home which just 3 days ago suddenly decided logging in was a minimum 20 minute operation!

This isn't a news piece...

[canfirman]

...it's a PR piece. The whole article puts a "Microsoft is better" slant on the whole issue of Microsoft vs. Linux. Also interesting to note who the author is..."Matt Lambert is director of government affairs at Microsoft"

Since this audit is being paid by Microsoft and being done in conjunction with Ernst & Young, you know for sure it will not be an unbiased audit (which goes against auditor independence).

Personally, I'm not holding my breath on a fair and independent audit.

Bit of background

[Anonymous Coward]

Some background to this:

This is about Linux on the desktop. Newham are (for example) already running their website (and intranet) on RedHat CCM (APLAWS) on Linux.

I believe Newham's IT Director is an OSS fan. Linux on the desktop across an organisation is still pretty radical; one of the main drivers is security. Newham have been sold the idea by the great Eddie Bleasdale (UK 30-year I.T. veteran and Linux evangelist) of Netproject, who have also sold it to South Yorkshire Police. Netproject is a 2 and a half man outfit taking on Microsoft and doing a lot of damage. M$ response to South Yorkshire was deep discounts.

So, unless M$ have an in with someone higher up than the I.T. director, it's not clear this audit will achieve its goals.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Newham or Netproject.

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.

Sorry, It's my fault.

[Moderation abuser]

I get paid lots more than the guys (yes, 3 of them) in the Windows team.

However. I look after 110 systems while they look after around 15. My 110 systems are centrally managed, highly available, load balanced providing massive computing power to the engineers in the department, while the windows boxes are barely highly available and have no credible way of distributing processing.

The engineers use a thin client (X11) to access the Unix systems and no longer have a desktop Unix workstation, meaning changes for all users can be done in seconds the windows guys put a PC on every desktop meaning changes for everyone take hours, days, weeks and require a whole separate team of 4 people (yes over and above the server guys) *just* for the desktop support.

Tell me again why Unix/Linux is more expensive?