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

Groklaw, a day late

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, posted yesterday.

I think the shark Slashdot jumped a while ago must have died and left its rotting, stinking carcass somewhere....

Newham is one of the poorest boroughs in the UK

[b4rtm4n]

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.

Re:How can MS keep a straight face when it says th

[Dimensio]

Company's generally like having third-party support contracts.

AAAARGHH!!!!

Re:Cost of Training?

[silicon not in the v]

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.