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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.'"
Show us your cards, it doesn't matter now Mr. Ballmer.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
'[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.
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.
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
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, ...
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 the year of Linux on the desktop is coming after all. Slowly, but eventually.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I have an excerpt from the report's abstract:
"For the purpose of this study, Microsoft assumes Munich will be installing Fedora 18..."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
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.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Newsflash: sponsored study shows results that favor sponsor. Truly shocking.
----- obSig
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!
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
So were they just trying to make themselves feel better?
Stick to printers that actually support Postscript... There is no reason to ever buy a printer that doesn't support postscript...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
Romulan Senator Vreenak said it best:
It's a faaaaake!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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!
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.
"Now is the time on Surface when we dance!"
But liars figure....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
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...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
- Manti Te'o, Microsoft Spokesman
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.