Microsoft Funded Study Cinches 10yr Deal

Genevish writes "According to an article in the Register, Microsoft and the Newham Council in London have signed an agreement making Microsoft the preferred vendor for the council, instead of the original hybrid MS / Open Source plan. The council was very careful in choosing Microsoft, having an independent study done and all. The only problem is that the study was, you guessed it, not independent at all but funded by Microsoft. Their decision even had the journalists at the press conference laughing."

Comments

Re:Contact and Meeting Minutes from Newham

[ranolen]

I'm sorry, but unless you are a tax payer there then you have no right to petition. It is not your money that is going down the drain.

This is Slashdot

[rd_syringe]

This is Slashdot, where every little thing must be made into a juvenile jab at Microsoft. Because Microsoft is bad! The OSDN-owned website told you so... :)

Re:Where is the business planning?

[stratjakt]

You don't sign a 10 year contract with someone you don't think will be around in 10 years. Maybe thats what this is about.

Maybe some people can see the writing on the wall. That the "OSS community" will be assimilated by IBM. RedHat and other linux vendors will become IBM affiliates or subsidiaries. One thing's for certain; the fragmented linux server market will consolidate. And IBM will be right there to make sure it consolidates into something it can profit from.

Maybe a definate MS lock-in was preferential to the mere idea of another IBM lock-in. Maybe governments and businesses have dealt with IBM as sole source vendor before, and it left a bad taste in their mouth.

Hell, I know how much money and effort went into getting out from under IBM's thumb at the last company I worked at. All that System/36 shit. IBM's forced migration path to an AS/400. That company chose MS over IBM too. We rewrote all the old code, moved all the data to SQL Server, etc..

Having "linux" associated with "IBM" is a very, very, very bad thing. To almost anyone who's been in the industry more than 10 years or so, IBM is the "big evil corporation" that you all think MicroSoft is. They still see MS as the upstart company that broke IBM's stranglehold on business computing.

Re:the real study is...

[callipygian-showsyst]

I tried to use OpenOffice. Spent several weeks forcing myself to do everything in it.

I write a lot of documentation, but I rarely use any fancy features. Just straight text formatting, so I thought OpenOffice would be fine for me.

After almost a month, I went back to Microsoft Word. OpenOffice is not even close to the quality of Microsoft applications. When it didn't crash outright, I'd get the editor into funny states, I would see blocks of text disappear and get mangled, and I'd get corrupted files that couldn't be read back.

I was shocked! Is OpenOffice really just "FUD" from the Open Source Community?

Security through obscurity?

[goldspider]

You were just waiting for an opportunity to say that, weren't you?

because OSS publishes and fixes their bugs, rather than MS' security through obsecurity

Right, that's why Microsoft isn't releasing a HUGE security overhaul in the form of a new service pack.

Oh wait, they are! So much for security through obscurity!