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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
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
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
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 you're going to post someone else's joke, it's considered polite to credit them.