Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
'[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.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
Probably contains pricing information that they don't want anyone to see. If they disclosed it everyone would want those prices.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
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.
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.