MS Won't Release Study Disputing Munich's Linux-Switch Savings

itwbennett writes "As previously reported on Slashdot, in November of last year, the city of Munich reported savings of over €10 million from its switch to Linux. Microsoft subsequently commissioned a study (conducted by HP) that found that, in fact, 'Munich would have saved €43.7 million if it had stuck with Microsoft.' Now, Microsoft has said it won't release the study, saying that '[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'"

Comments

show us

[Sadsfae]

Show us your cards, it doesn't matter now Mr. Ballmer.

Re:show us

[tripleevenfall]

MSFT's internal study predicted that Munich would have saved so much because everyone would have been too busy dancing with their tablets to perform any governance or spend any money.

Re:show us

[ackthpt]

Show us your cards, it doesn't matter now Mr. Ballmer.

What, and show you all the spots they've put on them? That kind of ink isn't cheap, you know!

Re:show us

[Pieroxy]

Munich: The first 6 digits of PI are 3.14159
MS: No, it's 123456. Honest, we've done a study and all.
Munich: Oh, great, can you show us?
MS: No, it's for internal purposes only. But trust us, it's 123456 allright.

Re:show us

[gtall]

It's Hammer time!!! C'mon Steve, show us your simian moves, get jiggy with it!!!

Re:show us

[Technician]

Probably a 1st year study where hardware is replaced and upgraded and proprietary hardware is discarded + training costs. Read the Ernie Ball story. Switching has a cost... at first. Ernie Ball had an unexpected cost of sticking with windows, A BSA Audit. With an audit, the savings is more immediate and a serious liability is removed.
http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

Re:show us

[cshark]

You would think, logically, that Microsoft would have no problem releasing such information if said information were correct. Then again, it's also entirely possible that there is no study, never was, and that they're pulling the numbers out of thin air. Wouldn't be the first time they pulled something like that. But it is the first time they're being called on it.

Re:show us

[ozmanjusri]

There is a study, conducted by HP, but they won't even show the Munich team what's in it...

After reading Focus' report, Karl-Heinz Schneider, head of the Munich's municipal IT, immediately asked Microsoft to provide him with the study, however, Microsoft also refused to send it to him

Maybe the savings were based on the opportunity to buy from MS before their massive price hikes?

Citing momentum, Microsoft plans 400% price increase for Windows 8

Today Microsoft announced the suggested final pricing for its Windows 8 operating system: $199.99 for an upgrade Windows 8 Pro. Currently, you can move to Windows 8 Pro for $39.99. Thus, Microsoft plans a 500% increase in the price of the upgrade, starting on February first.

Microsoft is proud of how its operating system has performed thus far, at least publicly: “[w]e are seeing good momentum with Windows 8 today,” the company stated in its blog post announcing the pricing changes.

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/18/citing-momentum-microsoft-plans-500-price-increase-for-windows-8/

Re:show us

[Tough Love]

Even if it's small, it's incumbent upon him to show it, because he says it's big.

Re:show us

[Tough Love]

You would think, logically, that Microsoft would have no problem releasing such information if said information were correct. Then again, it's also entirely possible that there is no study, never was, and that they're pulling the numbers out of thin air.

Isn't that called fraud?

Re:show us

[Anonymous Coward]

Munich: Remind me to never to buy anything circular from you.

Re:show us

[Anonymous Coward]

but they must be trustworthy, how else would they make so much money?

Re:show us

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only fraud when they're trying to sell you something.

Re:show us

[jakimfett]

MS: It's ok, all our Windows are square.

Re:show us

[Tough Love]

I wouldn't count on that restricted definition if I were you.

Obviously

[HaZardman27]

'[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'

Which of course is why they publicly claimed the 43.7M Euro figure.

Re:Obviously

[aliquis]

Switch from Microsoft to Microsoft and save $43.7 million?

I can understand "switch from stupid choice of products to better choices of products" though. And I don't find it unlikely that they had a lot of stupid choices there.

Another interesting option is if the switch to Linux saves money and then switching to Microsoft saves even more and then you can just continue switching, imagine the savings! Personally I have a hard time imagine you save money by switching back and forth though =P

Re:Obviously

[LordLimecat]

It was a proposed switch from Sharepoint running on Windows Server to Sharepoint running on Sharepoint.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

But while the HP employee responsible for the study provided the German publication with details of the report, HP and Microsoft are now unwilling to disseminate it more broadly.

Perhaps that HP employee was doing something he shouldn't have done?

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Micro-Soft doesn't want the public picking apart the flawed assumptions and conclusions of their 'study'.

Re:Obviously

[zlives]

just like insurance companies... now they pay me!? :)

Re:Obviously

[Seeteufel]

They offer egg, beans, bacon and sharepoint.

Re:Obviously

[ArsonSmith]

That's how much they would have saved in discounts. It would have cost them a hell of a lot more, but the savings were there.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

'[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'

Which of course is why they publicly claimed the 43.7M Euro figure.

Which brings up a sort of interesting point.... The EU has some rather strict laws regarding the "truthiness" of advertising. Does the public claim of massive savings equate to an advertisement for Microsoft? And if so, shouldn't the report be required to be publicly released to support such an advertisement? (Even if the methods and subsequent conclusions are ridiculed.)

Re:Obviously

[Arancaytar]

I heard you like Sharepoint...

Re:Obviously

[SpaghettiPattern]

'[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'

Which of course is why they publicly claimed the 43.7M Euro figure.

The question is why they blew the horn, the bugel and the trumpet over it, if they rally wanted it for internal purposes only.

Re:Obviously

[Alid]

the report is meant to give the die hard microsofties something to believe in.

Re:Obviously

[steelfood]

The 43.7 million is probably in short-term costs, i.e. the cost of switching over to Linux (retraining, deployment, etc.). The 10 million is probably the cost in long-term savings, i.e. the cost of Microsoft licenses and hardware upgrades after ~4-5 years.

What HP's study probably take into account is that the deployment of new boxes would've had to happen anyway, irrespective of whether it was new Windows boxes or new Linux boxes.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly. As far as I understand it, the linux figures are starting with XP, but HP starts with NT, so the migration cost for XP to NT are not covered. Also the linux figures include windows 7 and the needed hardware, which is also not included in the HP study.
Those are claims which are true! Yeah, and if microsoft wants to prove them wrong, just show the study, hahaha.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably retraining, too. :)

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they just stayed with wherever they were, say, XP, how do they save €43.7 million? They certainly wouldn't save that by upgrading from, say, XP to Windows 8 or even 7, and had they stayed with XP and support ran out, or ended, and no more maintenance was done, how would it help? The only scenario I can see it working is if they had an agreement with MS to share the source code, and being able to make whatever modifications they needed as long as it was restricted to just Munich govt computers.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this was done by euro branch of MS, probably for the precise reason to avoid this scenario.

What did you expect?

[h4rr4r]

Why would anyone ever release a bullshit FUD report?

If they release it someone could criticize it, if not they can keep making claims you can't refute.

Re:What did you expect?

[ackthpt]

Why would anyone ever release a bullshit FUD report?

If they release it someone could criticize it, if not they can keep making claims you can't refute.

Meanwhile, reports from the 1950's showed certain cigarettes didn't cause significant throat irritation. In other studies doctors recommended certain brands of cigarettes.

I guess it's just a matter of finding the right people to .. uh .. doctor your results.

Re:What did you expect?

[s.petry]

Exactly their point. It's all about protecting the FUD at this point.

Normally, MS releases reports about running MS being cheaper because of Admin costs being lower. They never mention the requirement for running Anti-virus/Anti-Malware, and in fact most of their studies never even show their own licensing fees. Usually they include the client license fees for connecting to servers, but tend to forget the much higher priced licenses on workstations.

MS office is cheaper than Libre office because of.. what exactly? The rate for re-writing macros is more expensive than a few hundred dollars (depending on your license deal) per user running MS products every year forever according to their logic. And yes, according to their logic you will be rewriting macros forever too!

Logic does not fit in their reports, which is why they continually spend more money on advertising and fake reports than they do on product development. They hide behind 3rd party companies paid to give benchmark results favoring their products.

The reason they still do as much business as they do is fitting with today's business logic. People get huge discounts and kickbacks to keep running MS products. If a shop moved to Linux, they would not receive the same kickbacks and discounts. Even if the overall cost is way more, you can't show bullshit savings to stock holders without those.

Re:What did you expect?

[PRMan]

You'd be amazed. I was at a company where we paid 90% of what we would have paid for Microsoft licenses for Linux "support". It turns out that we NEVER called Microsoft or Linux anyway, so why bother spending hundreds of thousands on support anyway?

Re:What did you expect?

[timmyf2371]

MS office is cheaper than Libre office because of.. what exactly? The rate for re-writing macros is more expensive than a few hundred dollars (depending on your license deal) per user running MS products every year forever according to their logic. And yes, according to their logic you will be rewriting macros forever too!

I'd assume the logic is more to do with retraining costs for every head that uses MS Office. Libre/OpenOffice may look very similar to a 10 year old version of MS Office, but office uses like their familiarity and learned shortcuts - even if there is a quicker or easier way of doing something.

And that's before you consider the retraining costs for all new starters, who will more than likely be familiar with MS Office. And the retraining costs for your tech support who will have to support users through a product transition.

You mentioned macros too. With MS Office, I can get help from the many users out there who post on specialist forums. In most situations, I've found that my question has been asked before so I don't even need to start a new thread. I'm sure there are similar sites out there for Libre/OpenOffice, but is the same breadth and depth of knowledge available? So for users who write advanced macros, you not only have initial retraining cost, but also an ongoing requirement to enhance said users' knowledge.

Is all that really worth it to save a few hundred bucks per seat?

Re:What did you expect?

[ThatsMyNick]

Ass covering.

Re:What did you expect?

[h4rr4r]

That is what you get from corporate CYA.

On the other hand you get shops like mine where CENTOS is the standard.

Re:What did you expect?

[mcneely.mike]

Well, I know one Doctor who "never would."

Re:What did you expect?

[TsuruchiBrian]

Our company uses MS office. I am a good programmer and a fairly competent computer user. I absolutely hate MS office. The other day I could not delete an embedded picture without deleting the one right below it, even though they were independently selectable. How irritating.

I am not saying libre office is better. I am saying it can't be much worse.

Re:What did you expect?

[ftldelay]

Unwillingness to release it is a sure sign they've got something to hide IMO. If it's true, than what would they be afraid of? Surely it would hold up to scrutiny, right?

Re:What did you expect?

[ArhcAngel]

When blamestorming (snikeys! it's actually in the dictionary) you must have someone to blame.

Re:What did you expect?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Why would anyone ever release a bullshit FUD report?

If they release it someone could criticize it, if not they can keep making claims you can't refute.

I can actually answer this. I am not going to go into details, but I have some inside knowledge. Sometimes these kinds of things are done simply to suck up to Microsoft and try to get more business from them. Of course you are asking why would Microsoft release such a report, which is a different question.

Re:What did you expect?

[realsilly]

....and here I thought I was the only one who ever said "Snikeys!". ;)

Re:What did you expect?

[SeaFox]

You'd be amazed. I was at a company where we paid 90% of what we would have paid for Microsoft licenses for Linux "support". It turns out that we NEVER called Microsoft or Linux anyway, so why bother spending hundreds of thousands on support anyway?

The same reason you spend money on a sprinkler system when you've never had a fire in the building?

Re:What did you expect?

[WindBourne]

BUT, the difference being, that the sprinkler would actually do something useful.

Re:What did you expect?

[plover]

They probably didn't account for the cost of Office 2003 users having productivity issues when the ribbon was pushed on them. And they're similarly unlikely to be counting the cost of people infuriated and inconvenienced by the hostile Windows 8 changeover.

Re:What did you expect?

[TapeCutter]

The claimed savings are just a teaser to get potential customers to ask about it. They don't want everybody scrutinizing their price list, they want to walk potential customers through it in private.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's before you consider the retraining costs for all new starters

Which will have to be paid anyway when you upgrade to the new version of MS's programs. Witness that idiotic "ribbon" interface; I'll be retired before I get acquainted with Access again. Which is a plus (so far) for FOSS users, although I'm worried that Shuttleworth has Linux following Microsoft.

I'm sure there are similar sites out there for Libre/OpenOffice, but is the same breadth and depth of knowledge available?

Actually there are better ones. MS software gains you nothing but annoyance and cost (with the exception of Excel, it is actually worth paying for, unlike every other piece of MS software I've seen).

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely it wasn't something you did! Office sucks because you fucked up a word doc!

Re:What did you expect?

[shaitand]

^^^This

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Office sucke because it is possible to fuck a a doc like that.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anon-Admin]

Retraining????

That would imply that the company trained you in the first place. My experience has been Training is not in the budget, Training is capped at $200 a year (not enough to get anything), Training is in-house (With an e-mail address that no one reads), or "You should pay for training as it benefits you by making you more desirable to the company"

How about this for retraining, We install Libre office on everyone's desktop and give them a free copy to use at home! Then there is no need to train or retrain them.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is what it feels like when doves cry?

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause why the fuck not? Why bother even picking something better?

Re:What did you expect?

[s.petry]

You sound like a shill with crap statements like Libre/OpenOffice may look very similar to a 10 year old version of MS Office, but office uses like their familiarity and learned shortcuts - even if there is a quicker or easier way of doing something.

The same shortcuts that exist in MS office exist in Libre office/OpenOffice, StarOffice, IBM Whateveritscalledtoday Office. Ctrl+B is bold, F7 is spell check, etc.. etc.. so your second statement is utter bullshit.

Your first statement about "it looks like old office" is similar bullshit. Why has Libre not done a "ribbon" like M$? Because users absolutely hate it, it's not efficient, it's cumbersome, and has no benefit.

Next you talk about tech support.. like most sysadmins do more than install and uninstall MS Office.. compared to a Linux admin which yum or apt installs and removes Libre office. Or maybe you refer to the lackeys that get paid to open MS tickets for users by a few rare companies.. which is a good waste of money on the companies part.

Your last statement is almost laughable. Of course there is not as big of a base for macro help in OpenSource Software macros. Don't you think that market share dictates how much of information would be available? Is that not a logical connection? If more users adopted, would the knowledge base not increase relatively?

Maybe you are not a shill and just biased to the point of blindness...

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

If logic fits in then for sure Steve Ballmer is a history long time back.

Re:What did you expect?

[Penguinisto]

Is all that really worth it to save a few hundred bucks per seat?

Depends - you;re counting immediate costs, not long-term.

When you consider the amount of retraining needed for each new version of MS Office to come out the pipe nowadays (starting with the stupid ribbon and going downhill from there), even with folks who are already mega-power-users on the thing? When you consider the never-ending EA agreement cycle (and that's the cheap way to do it when we talk these numbers)? When you consider that it takes fewer sysadmins to produce/maintain higher numbers of Linux servers? When you consider the higher downtime, Winrot, A/V and cleanups, and all the other headaches that are exclusive to Microsoft products?

I'd say the savings really do add up on the Linux side of the balance sheet.

Re:What did you expect?

[ignavus]

You'd be amazed. I was at a company where we paid 90% of what we would have paid for Microsoft licenses for Linux "support". It turns out that we NEVER called Microsoft or Linux anyway, so why bother spending hundreds of thousands on support anyway?

Um, how exactly do you call "Linux"? There is no "Linux Corp" selling Linux in the way that Microsoft Corp sells Microsoft products.

Would you have called Linus Torvalds at home or something?

With Linux, you can get your support from many different sources. If you paid 90% of the cost of Microsoft support, that is because you chose a particular support company that charged that much. "Linux" wasn't charging you anything for support. You paid a third party.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm at a large ISP and we actually have training.

No, I'm sorry. I couldn't help making sarcastic noises as I typed that. The "training" available to our end users is a joke. It's a few 30-minute classes that almost sort of covers basics like saving documents.

Users are trained by their peers and managers on-the-job to do the very specific tasks that they require, usually no more than minor edits to a few generated files. The only ones creating their own documents are the few PowerPoint users and maybe the very few Visio users. Macros come from dedicated developers and the vast majority of spreadsheets are single paged and completely flat. For fuck's sake, even if 100% of their work is conducted through email, you can spend multiple hours explaining PST archives and basic file management in simple English and get absolutely nowhere with these people. I've done it. Multiple times. For people making several times my already decent salary.

The only barrier to deploying any new office productivity suite (as far as most end users are concerned, anyway) is that it looks different. Seriously, that's the ONLY complaint I've heard during the painful upgrades to Windows 7 and Office 2007/2010. Many of them are STILL fighting tooth and nail to stay on XP and Office 2003. Because it looks different. They ran out of legitimate compatibility issues long ago. And now we're apparently about to begin upgrades to Windows 8 and Office 2013 "in the very near future". So nobody cares about upsetting the users, obviously.

I'll cut my rant short. It's a similar story with every other piece of software, too. The users are not trained for it, but they know enough to fake it until something goes wrong. Which is pretty fucking scary, really.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you consider the higher downtime, Winrot, A/V and cleanups, and all the other headaches that are exclusive to Microsoft products?

It got so bad that our client desperately started developing their own in-house imaging software a few years ago and employs products like Marimba to manage clients. The result is absolutely garbage and hilariously expensive, but still better than a more bare bones Microsoft-based solution (*shudder*). And don't even get me started on their FDE solution from Sophos. Jesus Christ, what a headache.

I'm no architect, but from my own experimentation, I would think that running Windows in a VM (or getting rid of it entirely...) would be so much easier, cleaner, and cheaper. You could push updates through a single snapshot file once every other week, use profile mapping to store files on a more reliable encrypted file system outside the VM, and use a simple cron script to rsync once in a while for the more important users (their current solution is notoriously unreliable and slow). Even if you had to maintain separate images for different departments (though I'm sure there's a clever way to treat disk images as modular to allow for different software installs), I simply can't imagine it would approach the complexity of what they're trying to do now. But maybe that's the zealot in me talking.

Re:What did you expect?

[dbIII]

And yes, according to their logic you will be rewriting macros forever too!

Back when I was writing MS Excel and MS Access macros I did seem to be writing macros forever because the syntax kept changing a lot with each new version so in some cases nearly every single line had to be changed. To get an idea of how drastic - they both had their own things, then started using VB, which started off as BASIC, morphed into something like PASCAL and now VB is pretty much a low rent ripoff of java.

Re:What did you expect?

[dbIII]

No. One reason MS Office sucks because these stupid image placement quirks haven't been fixed since at least 1995.

Re:What did you expect?

[TsuruchiBrian]

Why is it even possible to fuck up a word doc in a word doc editor?

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm linux admin and unfortunately also windows admin. It takes me about 10 times less time to do a job in linux than in windows. So where are the gains?

Re:What did you expect?

[Petaris]

My guess is that was for RedHat support. It is quite pricy... That being said you can always use CentOS, a re-branded RHEL, and get support elsewhere.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, reports from the 1950's showed certain cigarettes didn't cause significant throat irritation. In other studies doctors recommended certain brands of cigarettes.

I guess it's just a matter of finding the right people to .. uh .. doctor your results.

...
"I guess it's just a matter of finding the right people to...

*puts on sunglasses* ...doctor your results"

YEEEEEAAAAHHHH

FTFY

Re:What did you expect?

[Penguinisto]

Actually, VMWare View does a lot of what you suggested already. ;)

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be amazed. I was at a company where we paid 90% of what we would have paid for Microsoft licenses for Linux "support". It turns out that we NEVER called Microsoft or Linux anyway, so why bother spending hundreds of thousands on support anyway?

Paid 90% of the cost for support and never called "Linux"? Just where the fuck do you call "Linux"?

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

>It turns out that we NEVER called Microsoft or Linux anyway...

Have you ever made one of those calls? I've heard that CFOs fear using software that does not come with support, but in my experience, MSFT was next to useless.

Bullshiz

[Anonymous Coward]

MS would have release if it were true that there was 4x greater savings.

Pricing...

[pebbert]

Probably contains pricing information that they don't want anyone to see. If they disclosed it everyone would want those prices.

Re:Pricing...

[h4rr4r]

You mean made up pricing?
They could easily release enough to quiet the masses and not give away that level of detail.

If they are cutting Munich a one time special deal that would be even more they don't want to release. Save $40 million now! Pay $80 million next year.

Re:Pricing...

[FireFury03]

You mean made up pricing?

I presume the "special" pricing you get if you're a large organisation and say to MS, "we're going to switch to linux to save money and then talk to the press about it"

Re:Pricing...

[Alex Belits]

More like, special pricing you get when you are trying to produce a report that is supposed to show how cheap it is to keep using Microsoft software.
Microsoft can just quote arbitrary numbers and claim that someone, somewhere, could get them if they didn't use something else.

Re:Pricing...

[tripleevenfall]

I think it means "last ditch effort to save a customer" pricing

Re:Pricing...

[poetmatt]

Of course, guaranteed. Why? I'd bet you an infinite amount of money that it in some way completely skips the training costs and licensing costs of windows vs linux's nearly instant transition.

Re:Pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

how about the 50 million euro bribe^H^H^H^H^Hincentive to keep microsoft products.

Re:Pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr Ballmer, I appreciate the special price you had delivered into my bed, but I'll tell you straight from the horse's mouth that this would have been quite more impressive if I even owned a horse.

Re:Pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

All I know is, I'm not going to buy another microsoft product unless I can get a special price with €43.7 million savings too!

Re:Pricing...

[markdavis]

>"If they are cutting Munich a one time special deal that would be even more they don't want to release. Save $40 million now! Pay $80 million next year."

And if the Linux option didn't exist, no such super-special pricing would be available in the first place.

So even if they didn't switch to Linux, Linux *STILL* saved them millions of dollars....

Re:Pricing...

[AK Marc]

What's the cost to train for Windows when everyone knows Windows?

Part of the issue is that moving costs. So what are the non-moving costs of MS vs the non-moving costs of Linux? That's the real cost. The rest is monopoly lock in. It's in everyone's best interests to discard moving costs when comparing services. But it's in the incumbent's best interests to focus on next quarter and the "actual" cost of moving, rather than the actual cost difference.

Re:Pricing...

[weszz]

We got our MS licensing costs cut quite a bit last go round...

Then we found out the dropped Software Assurance on the desktop, cut support hours, dropped a bunch of software SAs and a bunch of other moves that saved a ton of money, but made everything much harder and pushed off the Windows 7 migration...

Re:Pricing...

[shaitand]

"What's the cost to train for Windows when everyone knows Windows?"

Knowing the current version is not the same as knowing the new version. For a desktop user switching to Vista from WinXP was as big a change as switching to Linux.

Re:Pricing...

[Teun]

What's the cost to train for Windows when everyone knows Windows?

You know you're quite funny, right?

Re:Pricing...

[tolkienfan]

Mod parent up!

Re:Pricing...

[AK Marc]

So they disabled alt-tab and the windows key changed functionality? For a user, switching from Vista to XP (how many did that, rather than the reverse), there are some minor differences, but Vista has an XP mode. Just make Vista look like XP and there is almost nothing that changes for a desktop user.

Re:Pricing...

[shaitand]

"So they disabled alt-tab and the windows key changed functionality? "

A typical desktop user wouldn't be using either one. The GUI changed, the browser interface changed, the office interface completely changed. Setting the system to XP mode doesn't remove the cost of retraining it just delays it.

Re:Pricing...

[AK Marc]

The office interface changed between Office 2003 on Vista to Office 2003 on XP?

Setting the system to XP mode doesn't remove the cost of retraining it just delays it.

Delays it indefinitely. I consider that removing it. Or are you asserting that we must cost all future upgrades into a present upgrade? No wonder people think Linux nutjobs are nutjobs.

Re:Pricing...

[poetmatt]

Are you blind, or oblivious?

There is not just "windows". You're not teaching people an OS. You're also teaching them every bit of software they use. Every bit of proprietary windows software in addition. So not just windows. The entire MS office suite, sharepoint, lync, all that shit. All of which is mostly useless until trained. Not to mention that training for it as provided by Microsoft is both a: completely useless and b: insufficient. So you end up having to pay to get people trained for it in addition to the OS, and now you have astronomical training costs (it's microsoft! we're specialized trainers!) + software people don't use in the meantime + license costs + hardware costs.

It's not even remotely the same as using linux.

Re:Pricing...

[AK Marc]

When you update an OS, are you required to update all applications at the same time? If not, then your comment is a non sequitur.

Re:Pricing...

[donaldm]

When you update an OS, are you required to update all applications at the same time? If not, then your comment is a non sequitur.

Updating a Linux distribution normally will update all packages associated with that distribution, however this can be controlled with an update server which is surprisingly easy for a System Administrator to set-up and administer. Third party applications have to be updated separately which is the same for any OS (Microsoft Windows included).

The time to update a Linux distribution is dependent on the network so it may take a little as a few minutes to possibly an hour. While you are waiting for the update to complete you can continue to use the Linux machine and you only need to reboot if you install a new kernel with outages for a desktop/laptop being approx 1 to 2 minutes and approx 5 to 20 minutes for a server. Of course an outage can be scheduled for a more convenient time.

Re:Pricing...

[shaitand]

The office upgrade was part of the Munich upgrade. They were upgrading both office suite and OS. Since the OSS solution gives them the latest version of the comparable suite it has to be compared with upgrading to the latest and greatest MS Office.

"Delays it indefinitely. I consider that removing it."

Good for you. A cost that can be foreseen today and is guaranteed to come down the road isn't removed. It's just a fudged statistic.

"Or are you asserting that we must cost all future upgrades into a present upgrade?"

Absolutely. At least the costs that are predictable within the anticipated lifespan of the solution you are upgrading to. It wouldn't be a very accurate savings assessment if you didn't consider the costs of future upgrades that you offset by switching to a platform that doesn't deliberately force you to upgrade or charge for the upgraded software. You also have to consider the costs as if you were upgrading the day of release since your OSS typically stays up to the minute unless you've intentionally chosen to prevent it. So if you estimate your open solution will remain installed and up to date for 7 years and you expect the commercial solutions would have pushed 3 upgrades to stay with the latest stuff in that time you need the cost of those upgrades must be considered as part of the cost of using the commercial solution for this upgrade because they would be saved with the open solution.

Yeah...Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's gotta be true because they say that they have the facts.

Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[SoothingMist]

I recall an article from a few years ago that presented an interview with a corporate CIO here in the States. He claimed that Linux itself was actually more expensive for his company in terms of paid support from the company providing the enterprise version they used. However, the overall operational cost was much smaller because fewer sys admins were needed to operate and manage the various node clusters required by their distributed organization.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, and the business processes are much more reliable. You hire 10 MSCE, and they obey a bell curve in intelligence and cover a predictable ground. Hire one Linux specialist for the same workload, and you are banking on just a single person probably twice the price of an MSCE. If he gets overworked, you can't just pull the next MSCE from beneath a railroad station bench to stock up a bit. You need to double your personnel, and you actually need to do interviews and have an interviewer with a clue. And you can't rely on your existing Linux technician for that clue since Linux people are strange.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[heypete]

I'm not surprised.

Of course, there's nothing preventing the company from using commercially-supported distributions (like Red Hat) on critical systems if they really need the support and clones (like CentOS) on other systems.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not surprised.

Of course, there's nothing preventing the company from using commercially-supported distributions (like Red Hat) on critical systems if they really need the support and clones (like CentOS) on other systems.

Isn't that exactly what he said they did?

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[tilante]

Here's the thing: If you really have such a small organization that one person is all you need to run everything... then you're better off contracting an outside company to run it. Yes, it'll cost more than the one guy would - but you can't really get by with just one guy, because of sick days, vacations, etc. Even if you only have enough work to keep one person busy, you're going to wind up hiring two or three if you need high reliability.

The consulting company will be more expensive than one guy, but shouldn't be nearly as expensive as three, and it becomes their job to make sure that there's always someone available, to hire properly, etc.

On the other hand, if you really feel like you need to have your own people, and things are the way you're presenting them - go ahead and hire three people. If each of your Linux guys costs as much as two MCSEs did, you're still saving 40%.

Oh... and if you "can't rely on your existing Linux technician for that clue since Linux people are strange", then it's your own damn fault for hiring the wrong Linux person in the first place. There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Personally, I consider myself quite charming.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[runlvl0]

There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Personally, I consider myself quite charming.

I suppose it all depends on the spin you put on things.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh... and if you "can't rely on your existing Linux technician for that clue since Linux people are strange", then it's your own damn fault for hiring the wrong Linux person in the first place. There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Can I get one with working sarcasm detector? Please?

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[SeaFox]

There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Personally, I consider myself quite charming.

Have you considered commissioning a study to support that?

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[aaarrrgggh]

You are actually best doing both-- Have one person on staff that can do 80% of the work, and contract out the remaining 20%. If the person on staff is good enough to be able to run day-to-day operations and understand strategic objectives and needs then they can save you far more than what you need to spend on the contract work. If you need to spend more with the consultant because he is making it possible to grow your core business, all the better!

I enjoy doing things myself... but I am quite happy to be able to call up a contractor to do a new server install and sort out the details any day. He's about 50% faster than me on most things anyway, so it is a win-win. I want to be replaceable!!!

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Kjella]

There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Personally, I consider myself quite charming.

I suppose it all depends on the spin you put on things.

And what direction you're looking from.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[jedidiah]

> Here's the thing: If you really have such a small organization that one person is all you need to run everything... then you're better off contracting an outside company to run it.

Then you've just trusted your family jewels to someone who isn't really a part of your team. They work for someone else. They have their own boss. They have their own agenda. They will try to "manage your expectations".

You're better off paying 2 of your own guys and have them twiddling their thumbs.

Outsourcing? Really? You must be one of the two Bobs.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point. Our sarcasm detectors work perfectly. We simply choose to ignore them just to piss you off.

HAND:)

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Personally, I consider myself quite charming.

I suppose it all depends on the spin you put on things.

The first joke was funny, but the others were a bit up and down.

Now someone needs to make an off-color joke about tops and bottoms.

P.S. This joke has a quirky flavour. Quarky?

There, the joke is fully run into the ground. Back to work; time to run my old desktop publishing software...

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.

Personally, I consider myself quite charming.

Have you considered commissioning a study to support that?

Yes, I think you should. It could just be an internal study.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[tilante]

Whether it's "your family jewels" depends on what your business is. Honestly, if you've got low enough IT needs that all you need is one person, you're probably not in any IT-related business... which means that all your computer stuff is simply support for the part of your business that actually makes money.

Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

This really gets tired. Repat after me: "First, the dotcom boom, and now the web2/cloud craze HAS CREATED SHITLOADS OF LINUX OPs PEOPLE IN THE MARKET".

Don't know if this is a fair comparison.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If Munich had stayed with Windows XP combined with Office 2003" - or you could upgrade to an OS made in the last ten years.

Re:Don't know if this is a fair comparison.

[lennier1]

And the OS is just the tip of the iceberg.

The project is creating a common IT infrastructure, with client administration, helpdesk ticketing, centralized solutions instead of every department doing its own thing, ...

What's not said cannot be refuted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like it's a selling point that sales reps can use with the hope that their buyer's may not poke holes in their study like slashdoters can. Seems like a good move to me.

as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[NynexNinja]

They all will claim that paying millions of dollars on Microsoft royalties and licensing fees is always better than paying zero dollars for a Linux deployment. They will always state that Microsoft products somehow have a lower TCO than Linux. The claim they make is that it costs more to hire Linux engineers than Windows engineers, which is a bunch of nonsense.

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[Dr_Barnowl]

That part alone is probably not nonsense. Linux engineers probably are more expensive.

On the other hand, I would expect you to need to hire fewer Linux engineers, and for the ones you got to be generally better quality and get more work done than the average MCSE.

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[Bert64]

Competent engineers are more expensive...

Incompetent windows engineers are ten a penny, incompetent engineers generally don't even know what linux is so won't claim to know it.

Competent windows engineers are no cheaper than competent linux engineers.

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[Anonymous Coward]

That part alone is probably not nonsense. Linux engineers probably are more expensive.

On the other hand, I would expect you to need to hire fewer Linux engineers, and for the ones you got to be generally better quality and get more work done than the average MCSE.

You will always pay more for skilled labor. If you got skilled MCSEs, that could write scripts, you also wouldn't need quite as many admins, but you should also expect to pay them more. Since most MCSE job postings are for lower wages, they attract the run of the mill admins intead of skilled ones.

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[mpe]

They will always state that Microsoft products somehow have a lower TCO than Linux.

Has anyone actually seen a TCO study where the T could actually mean "Total"?

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't think anyone goes to Engineering school to get a degree in Microsoft engineering.

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[aaarrrgggh]

Spot on... you pay for competence. The catch is Linux is a hell of a lot easier than it was 10 or 15 years ago, so there aren't really the same guarantees that there were.

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[AK Marc]

Competent windows engineers are no cheaper than competent linux engineers.

As a former competent windows engineer, I'd have to disagree. The presence of the large number of incompetent engineers drives down demand for the competent ones. There's always the risk you hire the wrong one, so you get two and hope one's good and will keep the bad one in line. So you have to pay them half to cover the difference.

But then I haven't been a Windows engineer since around 2002, so 10+ years out of that area, it may have changed. Everyone was outsourcing their NT to 2000 transitions to keep the incompetent engineers in their IT department from screwing it up.

Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies"

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Servers are point and click, Linux servers are 100 hours Googling, 50 hours reading forums, 50 studying documentation and another 50 filing bug reports.

Report contents

[Anonymous Coward]

They saved 10M
They spent 33.7M on the switch
Ergo the would have saved 43.7M if they didn't switch!!!!

Re:Report contents

[SJHillman]

Sounds like RIAA math to me. Except you left out the part where Microsoft lost out $800 trillion in potential future sales to every man, woman, child, dog, cat, rock and prokaryote that has ever throught of Munich

They can't release the study,

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Microsoft can't release the study. It has deep proprietary data about how much they would have reduced the price once they learned City of Munich is going Linux.

Re:They can't release the study,

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft can't release the study. It has deep proprietary data about how much they would have reduced the price once they learned City of Munich is going Linux.

Then again, City of Munich always was the worst of the City of Heroes spinoffs.

Re:They can't release the study,

[oneiros27]

My guess is that it has some information about how they could've saved money through other means (eg, not buying licenses for software for people who don't need it, etc.) ... which if other groups actually did, would cut into their profits.

Re:They can't release the study,

[Anonymous Coward]

They can always redact the pricing info.

Re:They can't release the study,

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft can't release the study. It has deep proprietary data about how much they would have reduced the price once they learned City of Munich is going Linux.

Then the results are meaning less and should be ignored.

Key to success is doing it right

[Anonymous Coward]

If your cutting corners, using the wrong hardware, using the wrong distribution, and lacking knowledgeable support, etc there is no question it'll cost more. On the other hand if you reach out to the companies knowledgeable about the hardware, seek expert guidance, and fund developers to fix your issues where needed. Then there is no reason it wouldn't be the more cost effective solution. You are cutting out the middle man.

If anybody needs to know who to contact try ThinkPenguin. They got the hardware down pat dealing wtih every type of hardware under the sun. The key though is to make sure your drivers and firmware are free software compatible. I don't just mean "Linux" compatible. My rule of thumb is if there is any proprietary component throw it out. No NVIDIA/ATI, No intel wifi, no Lexmark printers, no Dell anything, etc. Stick to atheros for wireless, HP for printers (but be careful, not everything is free software friendly, but there is good documentation on what is and what isn't if you know how to read it), etc,

Re:Key to success is doing it right

[Bert64]

Stick to printers that actually support Postscript... There is no reason to ever buy a printer that doesn't support postscript...

Re:Key to success is doing it right

[TheRaven64]

Well, except for the fact that they cost 2-3 times more than ones that don't...

Re:Key to success is doing it right

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much TIME recertifying every app at was just fine with postscript? Or even real PCL will do. Every time somebody has to touch the printer you lose TWICE. Once for the employee not working and once for a tech to come fiddle with it. Do that 2-3 times in the life of a printer and you blow $500 easily.

The REAL problem is most companies have nothing they WANT from IT. They are not actively advancing their use of IT to save money. They don't see that $500 as "lost" because that IT person could have been doing something else that GAINED the company $500... So they really lost $1000 saving $300 on a printer.

Re:Key to success is doing it right

[dutchwhizzman]

I tend to advice PCL these days. PostScript support is often slower, buggier and has less fonts available than modern PCL compatible laser printers do. Most business printers are either USB or (wireless) ethernet linked now. Most are able to process and rip their own content, and have support for multiple operating systems and standards. Buying PostScript printers used to be the safe bet since those were supported on all your OSes and they didn't put PostScript on budget printers that weren't properly supported on multiple OSes anyway. Times have changed. I'd advice you to re-evaluate your advice based on new data with modern printers. You just may find yourself suddenly liking the PCL output option of a dual personality printer more than you do the PostScript.

Re:Key to success is doing it right

[jedidiah]

They will also likely last more than 2-3 times as long.

It doesn't pay to buy cheap crap. It will just break sooner. It will also likely have higher operational costs.

Finance is a little more subtle than grabbing the cheapest thing available at Wal-mart.

Re:Key to success is doing it right

[TheRaven64]

Not really. The difference between a cheap and an expensive laser printer is often just the cost of an extra CPU and control logic. The mechanical parts are identical (and you can use spares from the cheaper ones in the more expensive ones. Or vice versa if you are a bit crazy). PostScript is quite CPU-intensive. You need at least a 100MHz MIPS CPU to keep up with the print speed of a modern printer, and ideally at least a 250MHz core. You also need a PostScript interpreter. Something simpler can be handled with just a frame buffer the size of a printed page. The extra cost is likely $10-20 for the PostScript parts, but once you get there you're into differentiation territory and so the premium is significantly more.

plausable deniability

[davydagger]

the report is meant to give the die hard microsofties something to believe in.

Although it won't stand up to scrunity by the outside world it doesn't have to. It will keep the faithful, faithful

Maybe

[phantomfive]

Maybe the year of Linux on the desktop is coming after all. Slowly, but eventually.

Re:Maybe

[Dracos]

It'll be 2015, because of Windows 8 and the Surface tablets.. The OEMs will need time to renegotiate their Windows distribution licenses, then find distros to partner with.

Re:Maybe

[spacepimp]

Sadly for it to happen the desktop had to become irrelevant. Still I think it is a good thing overall.

Re:Maybe

[pjbass]

Maybe the year of Linux on the desktop is coming after all. Slowly, but eventually.

It's been here for awhile. It's called Android.

Re:Maybe

[marcosdumay]

The desktop is not irrelevant. It'll stay relevant as long as the current IO technology remains. (Unless you define "desktop" == "windows PC", then it's becoming irrelevant.)

There are three different things happening right now.

1 - There are plenty of people that don't have a smartphone, and want one (ditto for tablets, those are competing with laptops in some sense, and got some of their market);
2 - People are running away from Windows. Some people are forcing themselves to use bad shaped computers just so that they can escape, other are only running away from the recent versions of Windows;
3 - There was a worldwide economical depression for the last 4.5 years.

Number 1 is going away fast. As phones get cheaper the potential market expands even faster than people aquire them, but the end of the monetary growth is in sight already (in units the phone market will still grow for some time). Number 2 is bad news for Microsoft and nobody else, it matters only to the extent that another OS can take over some market now. Number 3 means people won't buy new computers, not that their current computers are irrelevant; it'll go away some day, but I won't try to guess when.

Re:Maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Too true. I hope Steam/Ubuntu make inroads on the tablet/hand-held.

With trackpads only.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I have an excerpt from the report's abstract:

"For the purpose of this study, Microsoft assumes Munich will be installing Fedora 18..."

In Other News

[killmenow]

I commissioned my own study that says Microsoft is full of shit. I'm not releasing the study itself or the details of our methodology. But trust me on this, it's true.

Re:In Other News

[93 Escort Wagon]

I ran my own study to test your claims, and I'm afraid your conclusions appear wrong.

They're only 83% full.

Re:In Other News

[Alien Being]

Ballmer's pants are 200% full.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=blivot

Re:In Other News

[steelfood]

It's half empty according to Microsoft.

ESPECIALLY since they raised the costs by 15-45%

[Anonymous Coward]

With the average cost increase being 20%.

Liars!

[aglider]

That's clearly an excuse!
At the best the study is not fake. HP just fooled MS around and they don't want everyone to know.
At the worse, the claims by MS are false, the study is fake and they just got uncovered!

Re:Liars!

[Anonymous Coward]

One poorly run company paid to do a study for another poorly run company. What's not to trust?

The MS study by HP

[sl4shd0rk]

Went something like this:

Dear Bill/Steve,
We have spent 6 months evaluating Linux in the Munich offices and have found the following issues:

1) IE is not installed so many of compatibility webpages you wanted us to evaluate did not work correctly.

2) The accounts which were created in Active Directory to allow for LDAP logins in Linux have a schema different from the documentation you provided and did not work correctly.

3) The Excel spreadsheets saved in the Open Document Format were not compatible with LibreOffice's Open Document Format and did not display all sheets corrrecly. Apparently the format is different than what was specificed in the standard you provided.

4) The Macro virus attached to the Excel spreadsheet *did* execute correctly and damaged one of the exported NTFS filesystems on the SAMBA server.

In closing, for the 6 months of screwing around trying to get your proprietary solutions to play nicely via the advertised specifications we've found none of them worked as advertised (except for fore-mentioned virus) and are billing you €40.7 million for our lead times and €3.7 million to cover anger management therapy for our support personnel.

Yours truly,
Meg W.

Re:The MS study by HP

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they did say Munich would have saved $43.7m, they didn't say whose millions. :P

Re:The MS study by HP

[leuk_he]

Actually you might be closer to the truth than you think.

IE was installed, since a lot of the workstations had a vm to run windows for incompable apps

and there were some 20000 macros (really that much?) converted. some were not becuase of strange bugs. But they fail to tell that those macro's would have beeen converted anyway when going to new version of office.

Ummm..

[Anonymous Coward]

My study found that using chocolate instead of computers would have saved €9811.4 trillion. I'm not releasing the study as its for internal FUD purposes only.

Newsflash

[vinn]

Newsflash: sponsored study shows results that favor sponsor. Truly shocking.

Re:Newsflash

[steelfood]

Sponsored study by interested third party shows results that favor sponsor

FTFY.

HP/Compaq is hardly a neutral third party.

Wait a minute

[pswPhD]

From the article

Operating the Microsoft software (not including licensing fees) would cost [EUR]17 million, while the alternative will amount to almost [EUR]61 million

(emphasis mine)

Of course if you exclude the cost of buying (sorry- licensing) the software it is cheaper!

Re:Wait a minute

[maxwell demon]

Yeah, and burning $100 bills (not including the bills) is cheaper than going to the cinema.

Re:Wait a minute

[cupantae]

I can't believe I got this far through the comments before somebody mentioned this.
All this "FUD" and "flawed assumptions" and other speculation is absolutely pointless. From TFA:

If Munich had stayed with Windows XP combined with Office 2003 instead of choosing Linux combined with OpenOffice.org, it would have saved money, the study apparently claimed.

That is the comparison being made: XP to Linux. XP is no longer a supported OS, and will eventually be too out-of-date to keep using. In other words, the study compares changing software to putting off changing software. The study found that putting off a switch or upgrade means short-term savings. We know this, and it's not beneficial to Microsoft for this to be known. There may be a lack of rigour, flawed assumptions or other problems with it, but even on the face of it, this is not a study to go waving about for Microsoft

well..

[Anonymous Coward]

they tried to advertise Windows and .NET with one of their "studies" years ago when the London Stock Exchange started using their products for it's trading system and they even made a nice video about it:

Get the Facts: The London Stock Exchange
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSM55bsCrM

but it looks like it didn't turn out that well..

London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform

London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux
http://www.linuxtoday.com/high_performance/2009100702835NWDPSV

The London Stock Exchange moves to Novell Linux
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-london-stock-exchange-moves-to-novell-linux/8285

maybe they learned their lesson now

Re:well..

[Bert64]

You forgot to link to the stories about the catastrophic failures and day long outages the london stock exchange suffered while they were running a windows based system...

Re:well..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it was made by accenture, worthless company, everything they make is outsourced to India. If you have ever worked with Indians, you know how incompetent they are.
They can't read instruction :
Me : Hey indian, you missed xyz.
Indian : Sir, you haven't written that we should do xyz!!
Me :It was on page 2, point 2.
Indian : oh...
Each time that I am dealing with them, I have a conversation like that. For management, they are saving up money, because, one indian is cheaper than one guy here. Never mind that we are wasting 3 times the amount to supervise them.

Re:well..

[UnknownSoldier]

Pity there wasn't a follow up to when Ernie Ball switched to Linux back in 2003.

http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

Re:well..

[Anonymous Coward]

so you would say they did not do the needful?

My experience with outsourcing is a 2000 page contract explicitly laying EVERYTHING out down to the version number, but when you now want Adobe Acrobat 11 instead of 10, thats not in your contract... but it IS in your contract that you can't do it yourself... so our addon price is this. * ridiculously large amount*

Re:well..

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what was the real problem? Microsoft's terrible Operating System, or TradElect's shitty software? Linux trolls never seem to give us the whole story.

conducted by HP

[Anonymous Coward]

"conducted by HP"
and HP is great at business analysis....

Re:conducted by HP

[tilante]

On that note... one place I worked tried hiring HP a couple of times to conduct studies and make recommendations for our network and systems. They tried that because they'd had a long relationship with DEC, and this was shortly after HP bought Compaq (who had bought DEC before that), and they were expecting the work done to be of the quality they'd gotten from DEC consultants in the past.

They supposedly spent weeks doing the study and writing up the reports... and when they came in, they were obviously generic company boilerplate that someone had edited, including many missed instances of things like COMPANY NAME. And - surprise! - all their recommendations were for HP products and services, with the only comparisons being to companies well known for being expensive. For extra fun, a good part of the body of the report was taken from a white paper that had been produced by a group at some university - they'd accidentally left in some of the text identifying the authors and where they were in the first version they gave to us.

We never hired HP to do a study for us again after that. As I recall, my boss also refused to pay them for giving us a report that we could have gotten ourselves from a Google search. Not sure what happened in the end with payment, but their local people, who were former DEC people, were deeply embarrassed.

Re:conducted by HP

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like our gig at a large automaker....

We bought UCMDB and spent crazy money on it. They promised the world.

Then they came with their consultants (all from china, we couldn't understand them at all) and basically wasted all our time for some boilerplate code.

The system didn't work. Wasn't customized to spec. And yet they acted like it was no big deal and instead opted to insult our developers evaluation of their work.

Our company really had a bad taste in their mouth after that one.....

Bad press

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does not releasing it make them look like liars, but assuming the study is legit, not releasing it to Munich (which would benefit both parties) makes them look even more suspicious. And like a bunch of assholes. If Microsoft had any brains left, they would have quietly swept the failed study under the rug.

Internal purposes only?

[guspasho]

So were they just trying to make themselves feel better?

Re:Internal purposes only?

[Anonymous Coward]

So were they just trying to make themselves feel better?

As someone from the American Midwest, I can tell you that's a pretty obvious flag that someone's looking for a tool to be used in a passive-aggressive campaign later. If anything, literally anything at all gets out about something going wrong in Munich, you can expect to see a Microsoft drone figuratively looking at this "study", shaking his head, and not-at-all-subtly muttering about how Munich COULD have saved all sorts of money, but if they want to do it THAT way...

This is also why the American Pacific Northwest shouldn't try passive-aggressiveness against the rest of the world. They seriously, seriously suck at it.

How would you spin that if you were MS marketing?

[jeffclay]

MS may not have been telling a lie, just not the full truth. This is just clever phrasing by MS marketing. If Munich decides to go back to MS products then it will cost them 43.7 million Euros. By that logic (as faulted as it is) it is true that they could have saved that amount by staying with MS products.

Vreenak said it best

[VGPowerlord]

Romulan Senator Vreenak said it best:

It's a faaaaake!

Re:Vreenak said it best

[NettiWelho]

Here you go.

Re:Vreenak said it best

[Anonymous Coward]

Well we need to find the guy who has this report and blow him up before he hand delivers it to his destination, then we can only assume that the 43.7 million euro figure comes from damage to the storage medium and must be real.

Microsoft Tortures Puppies!

[Tablizer]

I commissioned a study which proves that Microsoft beats 200 puppies with a spiked club every Tuesday and Friday.

Sorry, I cannot show the study; it's for internal use only. You just have to take my word for it.

There is another reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

German law is very strict about advertising that mentions competitors. I suspect this is the biggest factor. Microsoft P/R would have not rouble spinning black is white until the cows come home..

Study proposes staying with XP!

[whoever57]

From TFA:

If Munich had stayed with Windows XP combined with Office 2003 instead of choosing Linux combined with OpenOffice.org, it would have saved money, the study apparently claimed.

....

The city's own calculations did not consider all migration costs, according to the report. It apparently claimed that Munich compared the migration to a 10-year-old Linux version with a migration to a newer version of Windows, probably Windows 7, and said that if the city had stuck with Windows, no new software would have been necessary.

Please tell me, oh wise ones in Microsoft and HP how Munich could stay with XP, given that it is rapidly reaching EOL and support for newer hardware is likely to be problematic?

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[Seeteufel]

It looks to me like Munich is only the tip of the ice berg.

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Imay be wrong on this one but I recall that money (whichever way the calculation would go) were not the only aspect considered - they also looked at the not insignificant issue of documents stored in known and open standard.

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[CastrTroy]

Which is why this whole thing is stupid. Switching to Linux+OpenOffice is more expensive than keeping with the status quo and updating nothing. However, eventually they will have to upgrade to a new version of Windows and a new version of Office. They probably wouldn't realize savings until 5-10 years down the road. But that's the way the world works. Almost nobody, in government or the private sector is interested in making long term savings. It's all about making yourself look good for the current political term or fiscal quarter.

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[aklinux]

I noticed this too. There is likely more to it than this, but saying the city should have stayed with 10 year old obsolete software just to stay w/ Windows isn't reasonable. Isn't MS trying real hard to get everyone (else anyway) off of XP?

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Says they started to migrate to whatever unix they're running frrom Windows NT in 2006? That must be a typo; how could they be still running NT? If they were running NT in 2006 while XP was 5 years old at that point, I don't think they'd much care that XP was hitting EOL.

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[aklinux]

I should have read page 2 before commenting, it states: "Windows NT was the city's standard OS at the time." As the study implies the city could have saved money by staying on XP, which they apparently didn't yet have, it leaves one to wonder about the validity of the rest of the study...

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[whoever57]

"NT", "XP", they kind of sound the same. I'm sure that when listening from a distance, one could be confused with the other.

Re:Study proposes staying with XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize Win7 is NT 6.1, right?

Where the savings would've been...

[khr]

The savings probably would've come from not having Microsoft billing them for the $43 million it cost to hire HP to do the study...

What a PR mess...what did Microsoft do?

[ibsteve2u]

What does Microsoft do? "Promote" people who design clunkers like Windows Millennium and Vista into their PR department?

Re:What a PR mess...what did Microsoft do?

[Nefarious Wheel]

What does Microsoft do? "Promote" people who design clunkers like Windows Millennium and Vista into their PR department?

Design? Design, you say? It's clear that all versions of Windows with funny names were "designed" by Marketing, not Engineering. That is, the people who were in control of the release, were not the people who should have been in control of the release.

The two divisions in any company will have radically different interpretations of the word "Quality". If you talk to a Marketeer, "Quality" means "cleverly named feature set". If you talk to an Engineer, "Quality" means that things work as intended.

Think about it. What real Engineer would call an operating system Bob, ME, or Vista?

Oh, hang on, just remembered Karmic Koala.
Never mind...

Patched

[RedHackTea]

echo "As previously reported on Slashdot, in November of last year, the city of Munich reported savings of over €10 million from its switch to Linux. Microsoft subsequently commissioned a study (conducted by HP) that found that, in fact, 'Munich would have saved €43.7 million if it had stuck with Microsoft.' Now, Microsoft has said it won't release the study, saying that '[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'" | sed s/study/bullshit/g | sed s/internal/sexual/g

Re:Obligatory Jack in the Box advertisement

[Jeng]

This is one of their best, and related to the topic at hand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRO9Uwm1tes

Samba 4

[ftldelay]

I doubt this study even figured in the cost savings they could get now by using Samba 4 instead of paying for Windows AD servers...

Dieter sprake

[tripleevenfall]

"Now is the time on Surface when we dance!"

Re:Dieter sprake

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you like to touch my Ballmer?

Re:Dieter sprake

[Anonymous Coward]

No!

Former Microsoft executive says CEO Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is not the right leader for the world's largest software company but holds his grip on it by systematically forcing out any rising manager who challenges his authority, claims a former senior executive who has written a book about his time at the company.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-microsoft-book-idUKBRE90L04320130122 [reuters.com]

Re:Dieter sprake

[oursland]

Kind of gives a new meaning to the "Ballmer Peak."

Re:Obligatory Jack in the Box advertisement

[93 Escort Wagon]

This just in - bacon prevents hair loss!

Man, I love those Jack in the Box ads.

Such is life

[Anonymous Coward]

The study may have been based on future touted Microsoft products that failed to materialise.
Alternatively, the study may have relied on licensing schemes and discounts that have subsequently changed for the worse and which would have forced Munich to have spent far, far more money over time.
Of course, it's impossible to verify. And in situations like this, the most likely explanation is that the study was based on 100% pure horseplop.
Such is life.

Speechless

[carrier lost]

I'm shocked at how many people here are saying bad things about Microsoft. Shocked.

Not a Microsoft bashing comment...

[roc97007]

...really. But at this moment, I can't think of any two commercial IT companies I trust less than HP and Microsoft. By a slim margin perhaps, but nevertheless.

Re:Not a Microsoft bashing comment...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I can

• SCO
• Intellectual Ventures
• Vringo the friendly Video Ringtone company

Re:Not a Microsoft bashing comment...

[roc97007]

SCO still exists?

Intellectual Ventures; I concede the point.

Never heard of Vringo.

Figures never lie...

[bobbied]

But liars figure....

Actually, it DOES matter

[WindBourne]

It totally makes sense for MS to NOT show it. This study is for MS's sale's ppl to go into companies with and make these wild claims. Look at what happened when it was found out what patents were being used for going after the android companies. They were all jokes. The problem is that almost all of MS's studies in the past have been proven wrong.
As such, it is a certainty that this 'study' is more of the same and would be shown to be so. That would be very difficult for MS's sales ppl to counter.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand going after him for the apostrophe, but indenting paragraphs. Who the hell indents paragraphs on the web, an english teacher with a grudge?

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[shaitand]

Exactly. Whatever metrics they used here are now proven to be bogus metrics. Undoubtedly they are using the same methodology to reach bogus value assessments now. They don't want people to be able to point out the method is provably invalid.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[rastoboy29]

That doesn't make it right that they can go around spouting lies.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[jc42]

I can understand going after him for the apostrophe, but indenting paragraphs. Who the hell indents paragraphs on the web, an english teacher with a grudge?

Or those of us trying to make "mobile" web pages. ;-)

With such limited screen space, it's just reasonable to treat a blank-line separator as wasting an entire line of usable screen space. Using CSS to indent paragraphs lets you use that blank line for information, wasting only the 2- or 3-em indentation.

Of course, we are still plagued with web "designers" in the mobile arena, and they'll as usual maximize the blank space for (a)esthetic reasons. It's an ongoing battle that will never end, unless we can find a way to eject information minimizers from the web. But there are enough users out there who prefer shiny to information that this will probably never happen.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[jc42]

That doesn't make it right that they can go around spouting marketing facts.

FTFY. ;-)

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Didn't several large companies agree to the licensing based on what patents MS supposedly held over Android? Are those gone now?

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[leenks]

Mod. Parent. Up.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent redundant.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[rtb61]

Consider the logic. The original study showed a saving in switching from windows and office to linux and open source software, rather than sticking with windows and office. Now M$ have an alternate study which shows they would have saved four time as much in switching from windows and office to 'er' windows and office rather than 'er', sticking with windows and office. Hey, wait up a second, something here doesn't make any sense at all.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[Johann Lau]

Come back when you graduated high school, boy

    May I suggest you do likewise?

Another hint: either an indent or a double space when you start a new paragraph.

    That hint is lacking a verb and makes no sense without one. Please formulate a complete sentence and try again.

Are you this bad with math as well?

    Did you perhaps mean to say "mathematics"?

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[Nemyst]

You rather obviously know nothing about usability and interface design. The blank space is not for aesthetic reasons.

Funny how your sig is so appropriate for your post.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the AC is just a dick and thinks that he/she will sound superior for it. Probably the same one running around with all of the racists comments as well.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, the blank space exists only for aesthetic reason. Literally, the only reason it exists is to replace an indent.

In single spacing, the normal method of writing is to put an indent (another purely aesthetic construct) at the beginning of each new paragraph. This allows the reader to see that a new paragraph has begun, rather than forcing them to rely on determining that a paragraph has ended just on the basis of where on the line the final sentence ends.

In double-spacing, the extra line provides superfluous space for editing and notes. And you're still supposed to indent at the start of a new paragraph.

The practice of adding a blank space in web design and web-based text boxes is because the common method of creating an indent in word processors, TAB, has been circumvented to be used for moving the caret between mouse-clickable objects and links on a web-page so that some nominal keyboard-based method of using a browser still exists. That only leaves a brute force method of having a number of spaces before typing, which is both a hassle and not guaranteed to work with all web-based text boxes as some of them may automatically dump the preceding spaces as trash text.

Re:Actually, it DOES matter

[DarwinSurvivor]

I remember reading (on slashdot I think) about a study Microsoft did that showed that they released more security updates than Linux. It turned out their research department had found a single month in 5 years worth of updates where they did and used that hand-picked statistical anomaly as the basis of their claim.

Night is day and day is night

[EmperorOfCanada]

I commissioned a study "for internal purposes only" that proves that day is night and that night is day and that all astronomers have been totally wrong to this point. But after spending millions making sure that the press prints summaries of my study I will not be releasing the study to analysis (and ridicule).

Microsoft full well knows that at this point the whole Microsoft vs Linux you must appeal to the faithful of their religion who will studiously ignore the ravings of the pagans and will hang on to every word coming from Mt. Olympus in Seattle. So microsoft doesn't need to publish this study. Its mere existence is enough for the embedded (and often well microsoft certified) IT staff in any organization to counter the 10 Million dollar savings. This 43 million savings not only is much better but will work well when a meta study is done and totals up the averages. So even if 3 other studies confirm the 10 million in Linux savings the average will still accrue to Microsoft.

Personally my experience is that Linux can be a great replacement for most but not all day to day systems. With most corporate software solutions going web it really doesn't matter which platform you are browsing from. Most employees of large organizations are shockingly unsophisticated users of the software so will rarely even notice the difference. Where you often run into problems are when legacy windows based software must be installed on many systems such as some kind of timesheet software. But a linux switch often works well as long as you let those who need Windows continue to use windows (say the accountants because they are extreme power users of Excel.) But there are other huge savings to be had by tossing Microsoft. In an all open source system licensing is really really easy. Then there is the fact that Linux can be so undemanding on the desktops that you can cut way back on system upgrades.

But there can be weird costs such as printer X that might not play well with Linux. That can offset some of the lesser hardware savings. You can be suddenly restricted to not being able to deploy certain windows only solutions.

The key to succeeding that I have seen is to start small. You take a small typical department and start switching the machines over to Linux and see what happens.

The key to failure is to let a small group of senior IT people with Microsoft certifications up the wazoo bring in MS sales people to help them thwart the effort. You can tell when this is happening when suddenly random senior management start protesting the potential switch to Linux armed with bundles of studies proving that the organization will be cursed with locusts if so much as one machine is converted to Linux. These will be people who were asking for an Apple laptop the week before.

Ditto

[Dainsanefh]

I for one will not want RMS and alikes working at my organization.

Re:Ditto

[Anne Thwacks]

That is alright. Hurd is not yet ready for prime time!

An internal study learned

[futhermocker]

Poking your motherboard with a screwdriver does not fix missing dll's. Note that this is according to a unreleased internal study by Microsoft, so I've heard...

Re:An internal study learned

[Anne Thwacks]

I call FUD. My study shows that, if you use a cross-head screwdriver correctly, you can fix 43 millon missing dlls.

Hint: crosshead screwdriver in the eye found painful in other (extremely priviate) study.

Re:An internal study learned

[futhermocker]

Alright, let's try th{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER")

Konichiwa

[Dainsanefh]

Nice, no NVIDIA/ATI, where do i get SiS / S3 video card?

microsoft removed the shortcuts.

[Anonymous Coward]

And those things not available as a short cut were moved (yet again) to a different place.

IE now has "Save As..." under "Page".

Why did they move it?

People had remembered where it WAS, then they moved it.

Obviously, this requires RETRAINING!!!!

Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[erroneus]

We all know that every time a nation or large company threatens to go open source, Microsoft sends its army of sales people with large expense budgets to offer 'better deals' to persuade them against moving away. These types of deals, of course mean better pricing and/or other terms along with lots of wining, dining, bonuses, gifts and kickbacks. It is quite likely their study includes these deep discounts which everyone would demand if this type of information was made available.

I know that in general, costs are available through open government legislation, but do we usually get to see the terms and numbers and types of licenses or how much is given for 'free'?

Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[swb]

Costs actually *paid* are part of open records laws, but discounts *offered* but unpurchased or only proposed probably don't get in records easily, especially as they were probably put up on a screen or on some kind of media that wasn't taken away or filed.

From what I've seen, there are a lot of computer products, regardless of how high profile the client is, where a company will basically throw away their profit margin on product and support in order to not lose a sale, either at all, or to a particular competitor.

I've heard this a lot with EMC -- EMC sales people have basically been told that losing a sale to some specific competitor means you're fired, so the sales people will give away pretty much everything to keep the customer.

And I'm sure the same thing happens with ANY product for high profile sales where the customer's choice is very likely to become public. The last thing Microsoft wants ANYONE to hear is that some $LargeEntity has decided to switch to something other than Office. ANY notion in the marketplace that there's a choice could set off a landslide of defections which would really hurt Microsoft.

They were probably willing to go in there and offer Munich cost-of-media-only discounts and basically lose all their margin just to keep "Munich leaves MS Office" out of the paper.

Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[bobbied]

We all know that every time a nation or large company threatens to go open source, Microsoft sends its army of sales people with large expense budgets to offer 'better deals' to persuade them against moving away. These types of deals, of course mean better pricing and/or other terms along with lots of wining, dining, bonuses, gifts and kickbacks. It is quite likely their study includes these deep discounts which everyone would demand if this type of information was made available.

I know that in general, costs are available through open government legislation, but do we usually get to see the terms and numbers and types of licenses or how much is given for 'free'?

So, in effect, Open Source has saved even Microsoft customers a lot of money by providing a downward force on the price Microsoft can charge.

I strongly suspect that Microsoft has fairly closely calculated the actual TCO of their products and has pricing policies in place to keep themselves competitive with Open Source competitors, at least in the short term calculations. As with any TCO calculation, much of the result depends on the time frame involved. Paying Microsoft yearly volume license fees makes short term sense, but long term becomes pretty expensive. Switching to Linux/OpenOffice is an expensive short term expense with a long term ROI.

Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[erroneus]

I wish I had known this when my company was buying Documentum... and I wish I knew who the competitors were as well. We could have saved a lot of money.

Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[aybiss]

ANY notion in the marketplace that there's a choice could set off a landslide of defections which would really hurt Microsoft.

That's why it's so wonderful that their products have all become utterly useless bloated piles of shit that don't do what any of their customers want. A huge amount of people are about to learn about 'alternatives' to Windows 8 and I really hope that at this point MS is finally led around behind the shed with a shotgun.

Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[erroneus]

Microsoft has doubled the cost of Windows in one fell swoop with their dirty pricing tactics. Volume licensing was a pretty popular was for large companies to save money where they would buy all the licenses for Windows and have their PCs sent to them empty or with a preload image sent to the OEM by the company. But one year, Microsoft decided that every volume licensed version of Desktop Windows is "an upgrade" and so requires a retail version, OEM version or Mac OS X installed prior to installing the volume licensed version. So you have to pay for Windows twice to use it once. Their sales numbers went through the roof that year and lawyers out there didn't blink an eye.

There is no way they are "competing" with open source. The reality is they have acheived critical mass and have been milking and maintaining it ever since. But lately things have been eroding their critical mass as alternatives have grown increasingly more compatible and usable. It's a secret they would rather not have larger IT shops learn about. IT people are trying to keep their jobs and if they can save the company their cost in salary or more by moving to open source they will do it. They just have to know it's safe and "accepotable" to do so. And lots of things are enabling this to come true. Among these are the increase in web-based enterprise applications really helping this migration along.

Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[bobbied]

We don't disagree here. As Microsoft increases its price, Open Source becomes more and more easily justified. I figure that Microsoft is full of bright intelligent folks who look on the "free" competition and adjust prices accordingly, but I'm not saying they don't overcharge their customers.

These bright folks know that the last thing they need is for Open Source to become an accepted alternative. The day that happens it will be game over. I would expect them to do anything and everything they can to avoid that day. That's why we see the FUD campaign, why they keep altering the file formats for Office products, why they covertly supported SCO's lawsuit and why I believe they must consider Open Source's Total Costs in their pricing structures. They may overcharge for their products, but that they have to be mindful of what will happen to them if the floodgates of Open Source get opened and their revenue stream gets flushed overnight.

Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh... What? As someone who deals with Volume Licencing on a regular basis I can say that you are full of shit. Making volume licences "upgrades" would severely impact mass deployment and would be instantly noticeable.

Of course not

[sjames]

They have no desire to show the world just how severely you must torture logic and how much fudge you have to use to make FOSS look more expensive than MS.

Re:This story

[armanox]

Who are you kidding? I don't care if Microsoft releases source code for anything, that's their thing. I don't want .NET, Office, or DirectX on Linux.

Easy Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to using BOTH and save 43.7 + 10 = 53.7 million!

Reminds me of cold fusion controversy

[twistedcubic]

If researchers refuse to publish their data and methodology, their "results" should be summarily dismissed by everyone.

Re:Obligatory Jack in the Box advertisement

[weszz]

I miss Jack in the Box... went there once in a while for lunch when I lived in the Seattle area... they don't come around Wisconsin at all since a lawsuit many years ago wiped them out of the area...

Studies cost money

[Anonymous Coward]

MS paid for the study to be done. They really have no obligation to release the results regardless of how much money Munich saved. If Munich actually spent more money switching to Linux, I'm sure MS would release the results to convince other governments/companies to stay with them.

If you are unhappy with MS not releasing the study, pay for one yourself.

Re:Studies cost money

[Lonewolf666]

True, but not releasing the study casts even more doubts on its reliability. A study being paid for by someone who has an interest in a certain outcome is always suspect. Not releasing the details is almost a guarantee that the results are biased and the owner of the study wants to avoid public scrutiny..

That is, if they really did a study and it is not just a number someone pulled out of his ass.

TL:DR:
Never trust a study where the methodology is not public.

The other 17%

[dutchwhizzman]

The other 17% is produced by either cows, or calves that are too young to be counted as a gender?

What about the rest of us?

[jedidiah]

This survey from Microsoft is far too narrow minded.

One of the key advantages of Free Software is that once a problem is solved, then it is solved for everyone. What has Munich done that can be shared? What can they share with other cities in Germany? What can they share with the entire rest of the planet?

The net gain of their efforts may be worth orders of magnitude more to the world at large and similarly undermine sales efforts by Microsoft everywhere.

Re:What about the rest of us?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some software with the marketing-unfriendly label "Eierlegende Wollmux" (in German).

Here's a better summary

[Anonymous Coward]

MS disputes CoM study results on the grounds that it sucks for them, and buys, er, I mean, commissions a new study proving that its own products, are, in fact, superior.

Wait, so a corporation commissioned an independent study to claim its the best option? No shit, really? That's never happened before in the history of business! Alert the presses!

And I thought, Microsoft got

[Anonymous Coward]

over that lousy attitude... And I thought of buying a license after about 15 years of MS absence, I will rethink that.

10 million euros seems like a drop in the bucket

[uslurper]

Doesnt 10 million euros seem like a very small amount for the city of munich to save?
What is that in percentage to their technology budget?

-I found a reference to their arts budget alone at over 160 million euros:
http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/home_en/Department-of-Arts-and-Culture/statistics_dates_facts

Business Needs are not always clear

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a huge Linux fan. My daily use desktop is Linux and so are the 25 srvs that I manage. This was my choice - every server could have been anything I wanted, but Linux was the best answer for the requirements.

I have also worked in corporations where switching to Linux on the desktop would not make any sense what-so-ever. My boss asked me to provide a design to switch 22K laptops and desktops to Linux. I couldn't. The systems involved didn't support Linux (or win7 for that matter). 17K of these were used by field techs and had to use WinXP for their hardware drivers to connect to specialized equipment.

The annual license costs for MS was nothing compared to the costs to create all new drivers for 10 different devices AND create new software. I looked at doing this for just the normal desktops too. Those were running custom C/S applications that cost $25M to purchase and $3M in annual maintenance costs. There was no way to port for less than $50M. That vendor had us by the balls.

OTOH, if all you need is office productivity apps, then a migration plan CAN be worked to remove the MS-Office program dependencies - mainly all the fancy XLS files need to be reworked into real DBs. Certain people will still need MS, but the way to provide that AND encourage migration to LibreOffice is by making MS-Office only available on a server through remote access.

All the desktops can run Linux, access shared storage on servers and remote into whatever servers they need access via Spice, VNC, or NX. this will end the continuous MS upgrade cycle and many of the license costs and most of the security concerns for computers running MS-Windows.

The old mainframe model is back folks.
 

more FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody complaining about the possibility of FUD is creating some of their own.

Internally speaking...

[berchca]

'Munich' is how Microsoft (internally) describes the German branch of their company (since it's based in Munich). So, translating the corporate speak, it reads: '[Microsoft in] Munich would have saved €43.7 million if [the city of Munich] hadn't used a bunch of free stuff."

Does anyone know how to say Bullshit in German?

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ can claim Munich would have saved a dodecazillion ultrabucks by staying with M$. The cost of switching to something that's free is generally lower than staying with something where they force you to keep buying the same, non-consumable product every 2 to 3 years. Sorry, educating people is not a cost, it's an investment, and the fact is M$ is like a drug-dealer in nearly every sense. Give it away at first to get people hooked, threaten people if they decide to try to stop using your product, and claim it's good when it is in fact stepped-on bullshit. M$ has been making deliberately buggy, insecure code for decades with a strategy of forcing you to buy a legit copy so that you can get security updates without which you're begging for viruses, Trojans, and other malware... as a means to keep the revenue stream flowing for the same product over and over.

I think 8 might be the last release of Windows if people see through M$'s bullshit finally, and migrate to better, free software. I can't personally WAIT for the day when someone e-mails someone else a document, and the recipient replies, "*.DOC?!?" really? You sent me a M$ Word format file? Try again, Skippy. Use ODT or you're not getting the job, etc.

Why do people use M$ these days? They don't know better, or they have legacy applications that require it. MAN I hate having to use Windows for legacious apps. But Wine won't run two of them, and if either of them didn't work, screw it... I have to use Windows much as I despise it. At least I still have old Win7 discs I can use, and am not forced into the waking nightmare that is Win 8. Some people are. Poor bastards. Enjoy your pseudo-tablet "experience".

Re:This story

[Anonymous Coward]

The Menace from Redmond offering to give away source code for anything of theirs is like a prostitute politely offering to share her sexually transmitted diseases with you. Thanks, but no. Keep your bugs, Misrosoft.

It probabaly cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft €43.7 million to get this study done by HP.

Just like all other cities

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look around you. There are plenty of city officers spending their millions in parties and hookers, while the poor bastards from Munich have to keep working.

And of course, MS is bankrupt because all their clients save so much.

One-upmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

The FSF or someone should make a press release saying that a new, top-secret report that they sadly can't release shows that Munich could save 43.8 million Euro by sticking with Linux. Every time Microsoft comes up with a new report, counter with a slightly higher number.

"It's totally real and legit."

[bryan1945]

- Manti Te'o, Microsoft Spokesman

Play nice

[anerki]

I use Windows at work, OS X at home and no longer have a Linux box. To be honest, I couldn't care less. I organize/customize every machines I own to do exactly what it needs to be doing. If it's a different OS, so be it, hardly changes anything.

If you're even slightly computer savvy, this shouldn't be a problem.

Then why all this hate? All that trash to soft through with people who are shocked about MS (or ANY big company for that matter) lying? Are you SERIOUS? EVERYBODY lies. Discounts happen ALL the time. And as with all statisticsn, it's how you ask the question and how you state your answer. The actual figures don't matter as much.

Many if not all companies selling their products (be it an Office, a PC, an ERP system, a middleware, a broswer) will lie (it's called "(pre)sales") and give sick discounts. You'll be hard pressed to find a company supplying ERP software that doesn't give 50% discount both on initial price and licensing fees for large accounts, or new/risky products ...

That aside ... about that study

- Licenses? Payed? How much discount? Coves all?
- User frustration? You realize a large chunk of the user base (the largest chunk in my opinion) will rage against the new system. Why? Because it's a new system, it's always difficult as IT to sell sth new to the business. EVEN if it's better. You have to take this into account, it can seriously drive up costs (even in sth as simple as XP -> 7 migration)
- Hardware?
- New software/scripts/network settings because of different protocols or whatever used
- 20% overhead for managing such a large project by default
- etc.

Let's at least analyze before shooting it down. That figure must be coming from SOMEWHERE, some analyst was probably wrong, but the data is there and hopfully/probably correct. The calculations he did with it of course are sth else completely. I've seen stated licenses were not included, and that's a huge cost but other than that we don't know a lot ...

Unjustifiable downmods? Please... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - I've done an good post when my 'naysayers' do to it what's in my subject-line above, vs. the facts I laid out here -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3400305&cid=42662767

* :)

APK

P.S.=> After all - what's in that link (my own I just replied to) is merely concrete, verifiable & UNDENIABLE facts... the 1 thing "/. Penguins" cannot handle, leaving them resorting to "the last resort of trolls": The unjustifiable downmod!

... apk

Unjustifiable downmods of my post? Please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - I've done an good post when my 'naysayers' do to it what's in my subject-line above, vs. the facts I laid out here -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3400305&cid=42662767

* :)

APK

P.S.=> After all - what's in that link (my own I just replied to) is merely concrete, verifiable & UNDENIABLE facts... the 1 thing "/. Penguins" cannot handle, leaving them resorting to "the last resort of trolls": The unjustifiable downmod!

... apk

PICS OR GTFO!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

In grand tradition, see topic.