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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."
I think the shark Slashdot jumped a while ago must have died and left its rotting, stinking carcass somewhere....
Email them with the subject "Ha ha" :)
http://www.newham.gov.uk
Josh
was this removed and retitled with a different headline? I also found it strange that no one had posted any comments on the original story
Not to worry! I've saved the original here. As for the original headline, I think it was just too fractured and unclear: "MS Funded Study Deciding Factor in 10yr Deal" makes it sound like the study was deciding something.
I also saved the original 11 comments, most of which were asking "where are all the comments?" I suspect a glitch in the system, but I'll leave that to the experts to explain.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
remind me again, how you save money going ms office instead of open office?
Integrated productivity. I'm using both, but I do find that MS Office is still slightly better to work with, since it's easy to copy and paste data in and out from the office package and other applications.
Just to satisfy everyone here... the downside is that it cost money and it's from our friends at Microsoft.
----
Now... mod me down.
Actually, I'm not sure that's true. Potential suppliers also have an interest in the case. The timing of this deal is interesting too -- I believe the government guidelines on OSS usage (which will require government bodies to favour open source solutions over proprietary ones where there is no clear advantage to the proprietary system) are due to be released in the very near future.
- What the US government has to say about IE security
- About Windows security vs. Linux security
- About 'Total Cost of Ownership' (TCO) statistics
How much more proof do you need to stop using Windows?Open source vendors are currently experiencing more vulnerabilities and receiving more security advisories than Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft has made a substantial investment in further improving security levels with its Trustworth Computing initiative
And...
One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns.
Really I'm quite speechless.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
ICT0.doc. Page 9 of 31 4.3.3. Although the tour was unrelated to, and arrangements were independent of, the Council's procurement of its future ICT infrastructure, Members should note that one of the tour sponsors was Microsoft, and the tour included a visit to the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, and meetings with Microsoft officials. However, this visit had no bearing upon the outcome of the processes set-out in this paper.
I still can't, for the life of me, see how MS can say with a straight face that something that costs money is cheaper than something that doesn't cost anything?
It is pretty easy to say that when you look at the total cost of ownership (TCO). For software, expecially on a network, the price of the software is maybe 1/3 of the total cost to use it. Note the difference in words: price vs. cost. Price is how much money is spent to buy something. Cost is how much money is spent to use it. Part of the cost is training. Switching everyone from MS Office to Open Office has a zero software cost, but sending each person to training classes so they are comfortable enough to use it, and then the time it takes for them to build up their effieciency all needs to be factored in to the total cost. Say you send everyone in the office to a one day OO class. Figure $200/person plus their salary for the day since no regular work is getting done plus a lower effiency rate of work for the next month or two plus the time spent planning the training time. And that is the total cost of migrating to OO from MS Office.
MS makes sure that migrating away from their software is demonstratably more expensive then staying with them.
I live in the borough next to Newham. Just to give a sense of scale I can walk to Newham in 10 minutes. And you can cross it by tube in less time. Although driving across it can take over an hour.
I also work 50% of the time in Newham.
It is mainly crumbling Victorian buildings with streets barely wide enoungh to drive the essential service vehicles (ambulances, refuse trucks, etc) let alone cars, busses and delivery vehicles.
It is also one of the key boroughs in Londons 2012 Olympic bid.
Now rather than spending money on IT why aren't they investing further in the things that the residents need. Repairing the schools, hospitals, policing.
You have to assume that this funding is from central government as the local council taxes wouldn't provide for this and would hopefully see a revolt amongst voters come the local elections (if they ever found out about it). Given it is such a poor and deprived area an OSS it project for the region would have been a superb idea possibly even run as a charity and gaining tax free status.
Hopefully the government audit office will investigate deal as smacks of improprietry.
"goatse? What's that? Anyone have a link?" - AC
Farming out support to an organisation that has varied skillsets with people in different locations is very important to us.
So far, the Linux system has been a success largely due to Service Pack 2 for XP. The MS team are using the latest group policy options to lock down the XP clients with all the latest NTLM v2, SMB signing, schannel and so on and Samba 3.0.4 handles it beautifully, in fact, handles it better than other flavours of Microsoft Windows. Saying that, it did take us a while to figure out that Samba 3.0.0 had a bug in it to stop it working with NTLMv2 but thanks to open source, it was documented in the freely available developer mailing list archives.
This has really helped me sell free as in freedom to management. The Newham council debarkale has sent shockwaves round the UK gov't depts (like mine) who are using Linux and even though the whole thing stinks, procurement folks are asking us why Linux instead of MS now that Newham have proven it is cheaper!!!
This was an important win for Microsoft and a complete diaster for desktop Linux in UK councils.
rd
BSA.
NEVER worry about licensing issues again. Go all open source and when the BSA comes to your door you can tell them to go take a flying leap.
Company's generally like having third-party support contracts.
AAAARGHH!!!!
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
You know what? I would have thought OOo would be a no-brainer if it was all I heard it was cracked up to be because MS Office seems way too expensive. I hadn't used Open Office before, though, so I didn't really know first-hand how it was.
Just recently, I installed OOo on one of our computers at home. My wife works with Excel every day at work--a lot of crunching numbers, auditing, complex formulas. I turned her loose on the spreadsheet app and watched as she ran it through a test. She put in some sample data and then entered a formula to do a VLOOKUP on some of the data. This is a basic formula she uses every day at work. OOo has a VLOOKUP function, but it just barfed and reported an error for the value in that cell. We looked up the parameters for that function in Open Office, and it did have one more parameter to enter, but we filled in that extra value and tried the thing several different ways and couldn't get it to report anything other than an error.
Second story. A friend of ours had to use our computer to do some stuff with an Excel file (list of about 1,000 contacts--name, address, etc.) before merging into Publisher to print postcards to these people. He didn't need any formulas; just needed to sort the contacts--by zip code or by name or whatever. He ran the sort he wanted, and it seemed good, except as he was getting through the output, he found that it had barfed on even that. It had partially sorted the list, but a lot of it was still random and there were parts of the list that hadn't been sorted at all, so he had to go through manually sorting a bunch of them.
So, from personal experience, if you are just going to look at static data in a spreadsheet and not do anything to it, OOo might be fine, but to...I don't know...actually USE it, OOo just doesn't work. Not something you can just teach people in a one-day training course. So how are companies supposed to switch to all open source applications when some won't even do the job needed? Maybe they could go with Linux and Crossover Office in this case, but keep a sense of reality people.
I did get to use the word processing app, and that worked fine--didn't run into any weird problems there, but the spreadsheet app was garbage.
I'm not trolling or flaming on this. I like open source and really wanted Open Office to work. I'll keep using open source programs where they are effective, but it has to pass that functional test.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
An anon coward post:
An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
In this case, I'm obviously playing off of the parent post's use of the term "retarded monkeys". The deeper message is you get what you pay for: nickle monkeys die, and in this case the so-called "cheaper" software sucks.
Did you submit the bugs to the OO.o bug tracker? If enough people start submitting these bugs, they'll eventually get fixed and OO.o really will become a killer office productivity app. If you're interested, the OO.o bug tracker is here.
This is odd because OO and Excel not only have the same number of params for VLOOKUP they also have the same meaning. Granted the last param in OO is called "sort order" while in Excel it is "Range_lookup", but they do the same thing.
I tested both the Excel and OO apps with the same table and got the same results. Both find the nearest match to the first param in the first column of the array given in the second param and return the value found in the column specified in the 3rd param. The 4th param specifies exact match if present and FALSE.
Try using the OO AutoPilot; I find it easier to work with than Excel. It seems to have the same info but is just more intuitive to me.
I used to use Excel for crunching reliability data and determining fitness for sale of hardware products based on expected PPM failure rates (that was 5 years ago). I had zero trouble with OO and actually found going back to Excel cumbersome.
I have worked at companies that have a bunch of Excel templates that they used for specific tasks. If you are a USER and not a CREATOR then starting with a blank Excel sheet will be difficult, too.
Sample VLOOKUP test:
1, 2, 6
2, 3, 7
3, 4, 8
4, 5, 8
5, 6, 9
6, 7, 9
7, 8, 0
and here is the formula for cell D1:
=VLOOKUP(3.3;A1:C7;3)
The answer is 8
If Microsoft says it enough maybe they will believe it. I saw a show on the history channel about Bill Gates and the person said that when me meets with his people he does his characteristic rocking back and forth and so everyone around him starts doing the same thing. Maybe in these efforts to "Be Bill" they go along with whatever he says no matter how ludicrous or untrue.
Bills rocking back and forth is usually a sign of:
1. Autism
2. Hyperactivity
3. Attention Deficit Disorder
or a combination of all three. For more information on Bill Gates condition try the following link.
http://members.aol.com/erichuf/Linux3.html
If you're going to post someone else's joke, it's considered polite to credit them.