How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "TechRepublic has the story behind Munich City Council's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of open source software. The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, in this case freeing itself from being tied into Microsoft's infrastructure and having control over the software it uses. He talks about how the council managed to keep such a large project on track, despite affecting 15,000 people and spanning nine years. He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."

Comments

To München!

[cold fjord]

A new set of verses is needed: In München steht ein Linuxhaus

Re:To München!

[clemdoc]

doch freudenhäuser müssen raus

bribery

[slartibartfastatp]

The question is, how they managed to do this despite of Microsoft Economical Power. How they avoided bribery of the involved politicians?

Re:bribery

[RightSaidFred99]

Lol, only on Slashdot. Modded to +4 for paranoid ramblings about bribery...

Re:bribery

[Grishnakh]

Germany apparently isn't completely rife with corruption, unlike the United States. That's how.

Re:bribery

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, how they managed to do this despite of Microsoft Economical Power. How they avoided bribery of the involved politicians?

You're looking at a cultural decision, not a political decision. RTFA.

"If you are only doing a migration because you think it saves you money there's always somebody who tells you afterwards that you didn't calculate it properly," he said.

and a little further down:

Munich is used to forging its own path. The city runs its own schools and is one of the few socialist, rather than conservative governments, in Bavaria.

Peter Hofmann speaks about Munich's open source migration at the Linux Tag conference in Berlin. Becoming independent meant Munich freeing itself from closed, proprietary software, more specifically the Microsoft Windows NT operating system and the Microsoft Office suite, and a host of other locked-down technologies the city relied on in 2002

Even Ballmer took time from his Winter chair-throwing training to go speak with gov officials. Knowing that the words "do not lose to Linux" were said, you can be damn sure he tried everything from price cuts to hookers and drugs*. (*hookers and drugs not available in all areas, some restrictions may apply)

Re:bribery

[Anonymous Coward]

Bribery is illegal

Many forms of bribery are legal, Gerhard Schröder (former Chancellor of Germany) retired to a managing position at Gazprom after ensuring it would be the main provider of gas for Europe for the near future and the whole FDP received millions in donations for supporting tax reductions favouring the hotel and gastronomic industries. Both lost a lot of political trust and nothing else, Gerhard Schröder pulled it before retiring so he does not care, the FDP already thin on substance got voted out of parliament on the last election, which means they got to stay in power for years after pulling that stunt and only barely missed the 5% requirement for participation. No punishments where handed out by the government and what could it have punished with everything being "legal"? Politicians write the laws and the laws regarding politicians tend to favour them and their alternative money sources, you are not a career politician in Germany unless you have at least one lucrative non descriptive position in the industry.

Re:bribery

[gmuslera]

Seems that in Germany bribery is outlawed instead of renamed to "lobbying" as in other countries.

Re:bribery

[bfandreas]

Simple: The conservative party who were the only ones to vote against this were in the minority. The centre-left party, the green party and the GLBT folks voted for the Linux transition. It was a vote for long-term indipendence against short-term planning and a matter of principle.

I had dealings with the LHM back then and I do fully believe they haven't saved a single cent on the transition. There were hordes of IBM and SuSE consultants stampeding through the halls and they hired a bunch of permanent employees for this. In fact MS made them a couple of offers which as it turned out they could refuse. They hadn't planned on saving money so special deals by MS were not that juicy.

The frustration of the MS sales reps(there were even rumors monkey boy himself traveled to Munich) must have been immense. Munich back then was still running NT and a lot of their servers were Suns. In short it must have been the big cahuna back then.

Re:bribery

[OzPeter]

Simple: The conservative party who were the only ones to vote against this were in the minority. The centre-left party, the green party and the GLBT folks voted for the Linux transition. It was a vote for long-term indipendence against short-term planning and a matter of principle.

And thats the difference between Germany and the US. In the US there are only two parties Right and Righter, so there no balancing effect.

Re:bribery

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop Linux has never been a credible threat to Microsoft's dominance, the threat was that someday the desktop Linux community may abandon its collective navel-gazing ways and infighting to actually produce a product that appealed to end users (not greybeard elitists) with real feature benefits. Ultimately this never happened and instead Linux moved on to incredible success in the mobile and embedded markets that Microsoft failed to adequately address for so long, the mobile Linux community (well really only Google) did what the desktop Linux community has always failed to do: Build an overall objectively better user experience.

Even given the many chances desktop Linux had it failed time and time again, it was briefly sold on desktops, laptops and netbooks but nobody wanted them and the reason is that it wasn't actually any better than Windows for users' tasks however when you look to Android Vs Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) you see that Android is better for users' tasks and that is why it completely steamrolled Microsoft in that area, by being better, not just by existing as a somewhat comparable alternative.

Re:bribery

[bakes]

I had dealings with the LHM back then and I do fully believe they haven't saved a single cent on the transition

Maybe they didn't save anything on the transition, but do they expect to save overall costs/expenses in the longer term?

Re:bribery

[couchslug]

They way they can do it in future is to invoke the argument that every piece of Microsoft software from the US is HIGHLY likely to have been influenced by the NSA which is an arm of the same corporate industrial complex.

The Snowden revelations underscore the argument that the US government is utterly corrupt, engages in economic espionage, and that the EU should put serious and sustained effort into avoiding "enemy" software.

The statements above can no longer be considered even remotely controversial. Anyone in the EU who advocates Free and Open Software has been given the perfect advocacy tool.

Any time anyone advocates the use of Windows for EU government or business functions, hit them hard and relentlessly with the security argument. There being zero logical support for trusting what you cannot verify, they lose.

Re:bribery

[Bert64]

Having a *better* user experience is not what matters, Apple have offered a better user experience for many years and yet they are still a small niche...

It's extremely hard to compete against an entrenched supplier, being better and cheaper isn't enough you have to fight to get noticed and this is very difficult especially when there aren't large organisations putting money behind advertising. People have to know about and give your new system a fair try before they will realise it's better, getting people to give it a try is the hardest bit.

The phone market was very different, buyers were already used to competition between different software suppliers, and used to buying a new completely different phone when their contract expires so its very easy to get people to try your new system.

Long-term costs

[Sarten-X]

He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail.

Meh... maybe.

FLOSS changes the costs. You spend more in training, but save on material. If your organization already has significant training procedures to accommodate big processes (like, say, a government would have), you'll probably come out ahead on the deal. If you have an office of 50 people who were all hired already knowing Microsoft's products, you can expect significant retraining costs that might exceed what you'll save on licensing.

Of course, managers who are focused solely on the cost will decline any training investment, figuring that it's similar enough to older Microsoft offerings that there should be no problem. Then when the users complain that they don't know the software, they blame the software for the failure.

Re:Long-term costs

[smooth wombat]

already has significant training procedures to accommodate big processes (like, say, a government would have),

HAHAHA! Thanks for the laugh.

I speak from experience when I tell you you're dreaming if you think government has training procedures. We have a training group and my area (the IT side) does more to train end users than they do. We keep wondering why we're paying these people when everyone comes to us with training questions.

Re:Long-term costs

[poetmatt]

Umm, the licensing costs are perpetual in many forms. So at no point ever can training costs go above the licensing, it's just a matter of how long to recoup. In addition, the benefits from always having the most up to date version of the software adds additional things in favor of not using MS products.

Long term licensing is never a viable solution, it's just a lot of people don't like to look at long term economic impacts.

Re:Long-term costs

[unixisc]

When they need to be retrained on Windows 8, they'll definitely prefer Linux or a BSD, which have options of Windows like UXs

Re:Long-term costs

[Vanderhoth]

Actually this is a good point. My wife works for an insurance company. People there are just expected to know how to use a computer and MS Office by extension. They never receive training and the results are half can barely turn their machines on, the other half spend all day running around doing everyone else's work. We seem to expect people need training with FLOSS products, but expect them to just know what they're doing with MS products.

It's shameful really, I've spent many an afternoon banging my head on my desk while trying to talk someone through the ribbon interface because they were just expected to know what to do when Office 2007 first came out.

Re:Long-term costs

[Grishnakh]

That's because you live in America, rather than an advanced, industrialized country with a well-run government.

Re:Long-term costs

[UnknowingFool]

One of the costs that MS always puts into their calculation is the cost of retraining for open source but puts $0 into retraining costs for Windows and Office migrations even though newer versions do require some retraining. As was noted in the report, there was actually less retraining for OpenOffice as it was closer to MS Office 2000 GUI than the newer ribbonized versions of Office that they would have deployed. Don't get me started on much Win 8 retraining will cost.

Re:Long-term costs

[X0563511]

1) You don't think this happens with propreitary software? The end-users still have to learn the software, whether you train them or you require them to come "pre-trained."

2) This is bullshit. I don't think you realize how much FOSS is written/maintained with no expectation or want of compensation. These people do it because they like doing it - and generally they feed themselves doing something else.

Re:Long-term costs

[girlintraining]

FLOSS changes the costs. You spend more in training, but save on material. If your organization already has significant training procedures to accommodate big processes (like, say, a government would have), you'll probably come out ahead on the deal. If you have an office of 50 people who were all hired already knowing Microsoft's products, you can expect significant retraining costs that might exceed what you'll save on licensing.

From what I've seen, small businesses won't have training infrastructure in place. Software needs to be able to be configured and used by people with little or inadequate training on the software or related technology. Large businesses do have dedicated training, but this is industry-specific. For example, insurance companies will have extensive training on policies and procedures so adding software/IT training is straight-forward. This is because the business lends itself to having a lot of people doing the same job, at the same location. But it won't work as well for, say, a retail chain. That's because while they have a lot of people doing the same job, there's only a few at each location.

What I've found to be by far the biggest cost in IT is support though, not training. I worked a contract out of a hospital that was switching over to a new electronic records system. Despite each employee receiving close to 60 hours of training each, on-site resources at each hospital given an additional 40 hours of training on top of that for more in-depth training, the whole thing detonated on the launch pad. The reason for the failure was that, although plenty of training had been given on the user interface and what-not, hospitals are highly specialized in how they process things; every department had its own unique process. And it resulted in a support nightmare that caused their entire organization's IT to seize like an engine without oil. Everybody, at every level of IT, was manning the phones for close to a month. There were no patches. There were no deployments. There was no new equipment being installed or upgraded. Everyone basically got kicked to tech support and pulled long, long hours, with queue depths that would summon images of the Krakken when viewing them.

While this was a proprietary solution sold with the promise of higher automation, lower operating costs, and compliance with all applicable laws... when the tires met the pavement, those savings were dwarfed by the support costs, which continued to be high for the next six months post-launch. They anticipate replacing it in 7-10 years. But in those six months, all the potential savings for the rest of its expected service live, vaporized under the heat of support costs.

This is not an atypical situation; most IT projects fail in this fashion. Open source doesn't change this. Zero cost software would still only reduce the total cost of ownership by perhaps 7-10% in a best-case scenario. If you want to save costs in IT, worry less about the software and more about the strength of your project managers. Ultimately, your organizations ability to rapidly respond to changing user needs and have a broad IT skillset across your department's labor force, will do more to help your bottom line than any technology or software you will ever purchase.

Re:Long-term costs

[fermion]

Which is why everyone freaks when something like Ribbons comes out.

It would be nice if we could train people, maybe in high school, to use technology and not just how to use a specific version of technology. I learned to use a computer, so when the different spreadsheets came out I was able to pick them up. Never have been able to pass a MOS certification, but I can use MS Office. Students now have to pass such a certification, but have trouble using Google Docs. So what has really been accomplished?

Re:Long-term costs

[Ravaldy]

Wetter you train or not is irrelevant. The cost will either go in inefficiency or in training. Training is cheaper in the long run. Been there done that on a different level but it's all the same.

Just putting a new copier in an office is a nightmare if you don't provide a short training coupled with a reference sheet.

Re:Long-term costs

[Vanderhoth]

Yes, I very much remember that argument. A few years ago we were evaluating Office 2007, my boss at the time thought we should switch us over to Open Office, but was shotdown with the "training is too expensive, it'll be easier to stay wtih office" argument. Not six months later we had an Office 2007 upgrade crammed down our throats and all hell broke loose, but it wasn't all bad. It was funny the managers that advocated staing with MS Office and wouldn't even entertain the idea of using something else were the ones that had the hardest time adjusting. It was pretty sweet to watch them sweat when they had to ask for help from the people they right out refused to hear out because the adjustment would have been too hard to make. We're on office 2010 now, but some of the same mangers *still* haven't figured out the ribbion interface. Karma is awesome.

Re:Long-term costs

[Hognoxious]

Don't get me started on much Win 8 retraining will cost.

I can't imagine. Does the interface work by doing Tai-Chi moves?

How many times do I have to tell you, it's "flower growing through snow" to open a file; you had your left hand the wrong way up - that's "badger with two dicks fucking a pigeon".

Huh? Oh, it deletes your entire HD and kills your cat.

Re:Long-term costs

[Grishnakh]

The point is that in advanced, well-run countries like Germany, the government (at different levels, this is about a city government) actually does this in an effective and sensible manner, which is why Munich was able to successfully switch to open-source software and save a lot of money. In crappy, corrupt countries like the USA, we get expensive debacles like the current Healthcare.gov disaster where big projects are given to political cronies and provided vastly inflated budgets, and disaster ensues.

Re:Long-term costs

[DoofusOfDeath]

I still struggle with the ribbon, and I'm a techie. It's just stunningly unintuitive to me.

Re:Long-term costs

[Windwraith]

No bad feelings or anything, but your post is kinda funny (in a good way).
Just to be a bit of a dick and to play devil's advocate (in good fun, please don't take it personally).

Worked counterexample, myself and Linux.

Amount spent on licenses: Zero.

Amount spent on training: Zero.

I am the kind of guy that likes to tinker around, so I got to know Linux's guts pretty fast and without training wheels (the amount of times I hit the proverbial road were staggering, I am not gonna lie, but it was all controlled systems a backup away from restoring function). Then again it took me about a year of tinkering around to master the intricacies, if you were needing it for a job, or to obtain a certificate again for a job, then yeah, your post is doubtlessly and unmistakably true.

Incredible information about the logistics

[GodfatherofSoul]

The thing that blew me away is they had a much more advanced set of issues to deal with than a typical bureaucratic office would. The custom macros and apps isn't something that a normal company would be hung up on. That would imply to me that so long as your office can find equivalents of their core applications (whether it be accounting or graphics software), the rest shouldn't be so difficult to overcome. I've always rolled my eyes at the idea of a real-world migration for company of significant size.

Here's an interesting tidbit from the article about how Microsoft inflated the costs of their migration to put a negative spin on the project:

A team of just 25 people at Munich develop, roll out and provide final support for the Ubuntu-based LiMux client. A larger number of people look after the everyday administration of the city's PCs but far fewer than the 1,000 people cited in the Microsoft/HP report as implementing the LiMux project.

Another hidden benefit is even if your project doesn't look like it'll pan out, if you make it high-profile enough you know you can use it to leverage a better contract with Microsoft if you decide to stick with Windows.

Re:Let me guess

[livingboy]

For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.

So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.

"always likely to fail"

[toygeek]

Which is it? "Always" or "Likely"?

Pairing those two words together like that is always likely a mistake.

Re:"always likely to fail"

[Fwipp]

Or, instead of attempting grammar pedantry, we can realize that he's saying there is no case in which this approach has a probable outcome of success. That is, all cases are likely to fail - this approach always likely to fail, no matter the situation.

Whether you agree with this assessment is another issue.

Breaking the chains

[EmperorOfCanada]

I suspect that everyone (except MS) are extremely happy to break the chains of monitoring licenses and making sure that their accounts are paid up etc.

If I were the CFO of a company I would love to answer the call from some MSDN "certified" bunch of losers call wondering where their renewal check is and I could then tell them that they can go to hell.

But now in these post Snowden times I would be extremely wary of any corporate data where a Microsoft OS has access to my data. How much state sponsored corporate espionage has been taking place with the cooperation of MS? None, Some, Tonnes?

Any foreign company competing with politically connected US corporations on billion dollar deals should take a long hard look at any US based OS and think, "Might the US government be grabbing my data in their National Interest?"

In some countries Cisco has been seeing huge drops in sales. I suspect that there is much more of this to come as it can be hard for a huge company to just throw their network gear out the window and replace it at the drop of a hat. But I also suspect that directives have been issued that all US gear is to be gone ASAP.

Re:Breaking the chains

[blackiner]

The difference is that you have the Freedom to find and fix any flaws in Linux.

Re:Breaking the chains

[Vitriol Angst]

I knew the Snowden impact was going to be huge -- not because suddenly politicians would be activated because people "woke up" -- but because medium-sized companies will suspect either rightly or wrongly that "hey, maybe some of that spying affected us in a trade negotiation or lost technology?" The politicians care now, because the MONEY cares.

And then you will see US corporations care about security like the auto company cares about Gas Mileage; they have no choice. Either show you are secure and you stand up to NSA or you don't get the sale.

NOW it matters. Some fat cat might lose a chunk out of their wallet -- and there will be outrage!

The damage won't be to US security -- but the economic damage will be in the tens of billions of dollars of lost sales.

Re:Breaking the chains

[blackiner]

You are entirely missing the point. You do not have the Windows source (sure, SOME people can get this, most cannot), and even if you did have it you wouldn't be able to build or distribute it. You are entirely at Microsoft's whim, and they are legally bound to comply with the US government. You seem to think a complex black box built by people at the governments whims, without any ability to fix the internals if something is wrong is somehow more secure than a complex transparent box that allows you to fix the internals.

Re:Breaking the chains

[clovis]

And you can get the source to Windows and do the same.

Are you talking about this? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx
I'm not sure what you meant by "you can get the source", but it does not apply to this reader nor hardly anyone else on Slashdot. Does your statement depend on some unusual definition of "you" or "can get"?

However I have had a copy of various variants of Linux's code since near the beginning as well as the compiler's code and apps, and I've read most of it as have many, many people. I doubt there's a need for an "army of $200K math/cs geniuses".

However, your point about the security of the repository is important as repositories have indeed been hacked in the past, and I can't claim that all attacks were discovered.

Re:Breaking the chains

[Lonewolf666]

Good point, but I think for US corporations demonstrating good IT security is no longer sufficient. Now that it is common knowledge that the NSA can, and sometimes will, show up with a "national security letter" and demand customer data, nothing short of a change in US law will repair the lost trust.

Because laws under which US companies can legally refuse to cooperate with US intelligence services will be needed to exclude the scenario that said intelligence services simply compel delivery of the data.

I guess the combined industry lobby will eventually be able to get those changes, but in the meantime the economic damage will be unavoidable even for US corporations that are otherwise good at security.

Re:Breaking the chains

[sjames]

Totally secure? That's a bit strong. It is, however, fair to say that subversive code in Linux is far more likely to be spotted by someone not employed by an NSA collaborator than in MS.

Re:Let me guess

[RabidReindeer]

They will shit their pants when they see the open office suite completely messing the layout of the documents.

If it takes nearly a decade, they must be pretty constipated.

Our public transportation never got the memo

[ReallyEvilCanine]

Tens of millions spent on new screens which provide less information than the old flippy-type info on upcoming and incoming trains/subways and they're down all the fucking time. ALL the time. Usually with the typical NT error message in a grey box on a blue screen. Or there's a dump and some module names.

Re:Obamacare Death Panels

[Anonymous Coward]

They're German, they didn't vote for Obama, and they've had a universal healthcare system for decades longer than Obama has been alive.

Re:Subjective

[MysteriousPreacher]

Given past behaviour it seems a pretty objective fear. Same would apply to any project, proprietary or open source, that doesn't offer migration paths for data.

Re:Subjective

[Anonymous Coward]

The desire to save money is, however, subjective. Freedom is not "vague," however. If you use proprietary software, you're not the one in control.

Re:Let me guess

[Amouth]

I think you are thinking about the Exchange server filesystem api. for exchange server 2003 and performance reasons exchange would replace the file system io with a special customized for exchange version. A few competitors complained that this was unfair, i think the final verdict was if they wanted "fair" they where free to write their own drop in replacement for the filesystem i/o

Re:reasons...

[SargentDU]

@zlives ... No, for freedom, is how I read it. They had older machines that worked fine with Win2K but would not work well with XP or newer, so they decided to migrate to Linux for the freedom from having to do as their Computer Operating System Company demanded. This way, they could upgrade the hardware as they saw fit to upgrade.

Re:reasons...

[unixisc]

I agree w/ him. It's important to do the right things for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.

If one just talks money here, the costs involved in training people on FOSS alternatives would get incurred, and invariably be higher short term. The real selling point ought to be the shift of control from software vendors to consumers. In this case, since it's a government, it's somewhat easier, but the whole idea behind it is that companies - be it Microsoft, Apple or anyone else can't dictate version changes or upgrades. If it is FOSS, then the consumer becomes a de-facto owner and gets to decide when, if at all, they upgrade, what they upgrade, any training schedules thereby incurred and so on. In other words, they get to plan when to budget for changes in computing environments.

Ultimately, the savings there are quantifiable at any point in time, but over time, the savings may not be there since one has to sometimes upgrade computing environments, whether it's on the schedule of an ISV or a consumer. That's why arguing about saving money is not a good approach. A better one is about shifting the control on any software transitions, and thereby budgeting schedules, from ISVs to consumers, thereby enabling them to plan better for it.

Re:Let me guess

[mlts]

That is my question... how does a large organization like a German city function without Exchange or being beholden to a SaaS for E-mail and other items? Some larger organizations (IBM) have their own infrastructure, but for a lot of things, Exchange is the only game in town once a place expands beyond what a single mail server can handle.

Is there a reputable F/OSS utility that is a drop-in replacement for Exchange (especially with dealing with multiple mail databases and e-Discovery rules) that has "earned its bones" in the enterprise? I've read about a few, but after a few months, they seem to drop off the planet, or get very poor reviews.

Re:Let me guess

[Shakrai]

There were patches scattered throughout the Windows 2000 source code leak, all with comments along the lines of "Putting this in for the Office team". That was one of the big discussions around here back in the day when that story broke.

The GP is probably taking it to far saying they were doing it for deliberate competitive advantage -- all of the comments that I read sounded like standard bug-fixes -- but it's hard to dispute that Microsoft obviously has an advantage over Libre Office when trying to track down bugs in the O/S that cause problems with the office suite.

Money v. Freedom

[Bob9113]

The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, ... He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail.

I think that is the core difficulty in advancing the use of F/LOSS (in the US at least). We are so culturally indoctrinated to see money, and the single-minded pursuit of it, as the measure of success that it is institutionally difficult to grasp sacrificing money in the short run for freedom; regardless of the impact on our bottom line, society, or the larger economy in the long run. The American mindset believes freedom is good in theory, but fails to see that economic success is coupled to choosing freedom -- in a broader sense than the freedom to screw your putative customers -- over short-run revenue.

Wow, those are some seriously run-on sentences. Bite me, ... ummm, Sklansky and Malmuth? ... Case and Shiller? ... Black and Scholes? ... Ah, yes, I remember! Strunk and White! That's it. What was I talking about?

Re:Money v. Freedom

[Pherdnut]

All non-free software is a rip-off and a scam, and I am convinced we should be able to prove it.

I agree with the majority of your post but I've always had an issue when people take it to this extreme. Is it maybe reasonable for a game developer to not give anybody and everybody permission to distribute their single-player PC-only game whose design assets alone cost millions to create? Is it even responsible to distribute the source of a web app that handles confidential user information? Is anybody who works for a non-free software company collaborating in a scam?

The Free Software Foundation kicks ass but if all the software of the world was free (yes I mean not as in beer but there is no real distinction for certain types of apps) there'd be little motivation for a lot specific types of software to have been made at the level of quality we've enjoyed in the first place.

Software isn't always just code. It's often composed of intellectual properties and other concerns that can't be protected if distributed freely. Actors like getting royalties for having their likenesses spread all over creation. Artists don't like having their distinctive works appropriated without being credited.

And what is a web-site but an app that's being distributed from one source only?

Coming from a web background, the idea of building a non-Free app using Free tools doesn't bother me one wit as long as you give back by contributing useful tools you developed in the process or giving feedback/support on the ones you used.

IMO, free and non-free apps are just a part of the same ecosystem. An Office Suite that let you rapidly port data for use in its various apps would have been a loonnnng time coming originating as an open-source endeavor. But there was serious money to be made there, which is a great motivator to find a way to get multiple teams on very different projects to learn to play nice together. This is not something open source communities collaborating between projects are necessarily famous for.

But as an alternative, a free version of an office suite also happened a lot sooner because MS has been a total douchebag about its software by turning interoperability into handcuffs. As long as OO has any kind of marketshare MS can only take the douchebaggery so far and I'd argue that free software has already directly and indirectly pushed them to make some positive changes. Everybody wins. As free tools and communities mature, non-free vendors will be forced to respond in kind and I suspect we'll all continue to win even more.

So don't see it as an adversarial thing. It's a relationship. A really fucked up dysfunctional one but that happens to produce a decent kid mostly by accident.

Re:Let me guess

[RightSaidFred99]

Sure they are, there Johnny Future. You are truly "Guy who tells everyone how out of touch they are for 'still' using things that _everyone_ still uses."

Let me guess, those losers using PC's are so out of touch for still using them. Oh, and car drivers? Pfft, why I just saw a flying car prototype so you're totally a 1930's loser if you still drive cars maaaan!

Re:Let me guess

[wumbler]

Many years ago - maybe in 1995 or 1996 - I worked on a team that wrote a load balancing software. We did some in-depth performance measurements of a few web servers, which also included web servers running on Windows NT. We finally also wrote our own little test server. We concluded in our tests that the listen-queue length on NT could only be set to a certain maximum amount (maybe 5, or so) by anyone using the official socket API that was available. However, magically, Microsoft's own web server (IIS) was able to utilize a longer listen queue.

Clearly, Microsoft is not beyond using secret APIs to ensure a competitive advantage for their own software.

People act as if this is optional

[dtjohnson]

The comments here are about the difficulty, the expense, the problems with user acceptance, etc. All of those imply that this sort of change is somehow and optional thing that they can choose to do...or not. In actuality, however, this change is both mandatory and inevitable...and only a matter of time. Maybe next year, maybe in 5 years, or maybe in 10 years but every single enterprise will eventually be forced to make this switch as Microsoft evolves and changes ('implodes' is the word that comes to mind) as it tries to maintain growth and earnings while trying to continue selling the same thing to the same places that already have purchased more than they will ever need.

Re:Let me guess

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Kerio Connect is pretty good.
The webmail interface is far Superior to Exchange web.

Re:Let me guess

[Amouth]

I've only found a few with the same functionality as exchange, and i can say that they are not free. while they have "community" versions, to get full exchange functionality you end up having to pay licencing fees to access and use it, and in the end it is borderline cost effective vs exchange. (yes the licenses are cheaper but support and experienced techs aren't)

Re:Let me guess

[MightyMartian]

Exchange may, to the end user, do what it does well, but i can tell you right now the Exchange 2010 server I just installed is likely to be the last one. What a fucking nightmare. I'm so tired of installing groupware that is nothing more than a badly stitched together bunch of spare parts where every solution to a problem seems to involve uninstalling and reinstalling IIS, and praying to the Web Server Gods that your partially malfunctioning mail server doesn't completely crap out. Everything about Exchange is fucking awful, and if there are any Redmond engineers or programmers reading this, all I can say to you is that I hope you die of awful awful diseases.

It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange is, how resource hungry it can be, and how simple fucking things like setting up a fucking mailing list or putting in some decent anti-spam tech (which doesn't amount to a rolled up version of SpamAssassin with some proprietary web pages and costs a bazillion dollars a seat) turns into a fucking nightmare. Fuck I hate Exchange. Hate it... hate it... hate it... hate it.

Re:Subjective

[X0563511]

The cloud is useful for two things and two things only:

1. Additional offsite backup.
2. Scalable processing.

Office 365 can fuck right off.

So they didn't save money?

[kenh]

"He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."

In my town we had a Linux "advocate" that insisted we should ditch MS and Apple for Linux to save "millions per year" in our local school district (our entire IT budget was less than $3M/year) - he felt that by proving Linux ran on 10 year old hardware in his basement, that meant we could use 10 year old hardware in the classroom...

His argument found no traction with anyone, he felt (among other things) that there was no need for central management of 1,500 desktops & laptops, that our robust networking infrastructure could be replaced by unmanaged switches, and our seven campus WiFi network could be served with an infinite number of $40 routers flashed with WRT, etc.

Re:Subjective

[jones_supa]

You can still use Windows 7 for a long time.

Wishful thinking.

[westlake]

Maybe next year, maybe in 5 years, or maybe in 10 years but every single enterprise will eventually be forced to make this switch as Microsoft evolves and changes ('implodes' is the word that comes to mind) as it tries to maintain growth and earnings...

Microsoft is doing extraordinarily well in the enterprise market and talk of an implosion is nonsense.

Commercial Licensing revenue was $9.594 billion, with a gross margin of $8.801 billion. This is growth of 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively. SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync all achieved double digits growth, and multi-year licensing revenue was up 8 percent.

Commercial Other revenue was $1.603 billion and had a gross margin of $0.275 billion, growing by 28 percent and 161 percent, respectively. Cloud revenue was up by 103 percent, with both Office 365 seats and Azure customs both increasing by triple digits. Two thirds of Dynamics CRM customers are now opting for cloud deployments.

Windows Division notional revenue is up 4 percent at $4.581 billion, but operating income is down 20 percent at $2.242 billion. This shows just how significant the impact of the decline of the PC market is, as well Microsoft's continued failure to capture any significant share of the tablet market.

Server and Tools revenue was up 11 percent to $5.052 billion, and operating income was up 17 percent to $2.026 billion. In contrast to the Windows Division results, this shows the much greater resilience of the purely enterprise-focused offerings.

Microsoft posts record Q1 revenue, increased operating income: Windows OEM revenue sharply down, but enterprise sales buoyant.

Re:Wishful thinking.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the fees to the customer have risen by 15%-50%.

Think they will continue to tolerate such crap?

Re:reasons...

[powerpopolon]

"He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."

Note that he doesn't say migrating to FOSS doesn't save money in the end. What he says is that if your migration project gets accepted only on money saving grounds, since cost estimations are very subjective, at one point some Microsoft-friendly bureaucrat with sufficient political weight is going to come up with an Excel spreadsheet "proving" the FOSS migration doesn't save money, and then kill your project.

so just to say FU MS?

That's one way to put it. But then it was MS who told them "FU dear customer" first, as in "NT and Office 2000 are dead so now you must buy XP and 2003 and if you need new PCs to run them too bad for you. By the way if you want authentication to really work well you must buy AD servers to replace your current directory system". It's about you being the one who decides on your IT strategy instead of having your monopolistic software supplier telling you what to do. It looks like a reasonable reason to migrate. It was the primary reason they gave and it saved their project from being killed by bogus cost studies.

Don't hold back

[DaveAtFraud]

Tell us how you REALLY feel about Exchange. We can take it.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Let me guess

[RabidReindeer]

For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.

So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.

This whole "Nothing else formats like Genuine Microsoft" thing is pure garbage.

I have never depended on a word processor to maintain constant pixel-by-pixel formatting. That's not what they're for. The only reason that Word documents don't routinely re-arrange themselves (the way they used to) every time you transport a document to a machine with a different printer/set of fonts is because virtually all word processing today is done with a standard set of scalable fonts. Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver. When most fonts were hardware fonts, that meant some serious re-arranging was commonplace.

If you want precise placement of text, don't use a word processor, use a page layout program. And create a PDF.

And if you want basic formatting to be preserved but pixel-precise isn't important, don't use a word processor like it's a typewriter and jam in manual spaces and carriage returns by dumb brute force, use styles. No, it won't be as immutable as PDF, but at least what re-arranging does happen won't look like crap.

Re:Let me guess

[Sique]

Sometimes it helps to wonder for a moment, if you really need Exchange functionality, or if this is just a) overkill and b) forcing the organisation in a direction you didn't intend anyway.

Re:reasons...

[Solandri]

Bingo. I've see the same thing with companies using Quickbooks as their accounting software. When you're first starting out, you don't know much about running a business or business accounting, and Quickbooks is really tempting because it's easy to use and popular enough that all the CPAs out there are familiar with the reports it'll generate at tax time. So most small businesses start using Quickbooks.

As they grow, some of the warts behind Quickbooks start to show up. You've started using it for your payroll, but Quickbook phases out payroll support after two years, forcing you to replace your perfectly functional version of QB with an expensive new version if you want your payroll to still work. The new version is frequently bloated enough that you also need to buy a new computer to run it. Eventually you say "Screw them, I'm just going to replace my accounting software." Then you discover that there is no way to extract your past accounting data from QB to import it into new software. It's your data, but you do not control it. QB does. They've trapped you in their ecosystem with forced bi-annual upgrades.

Re:Let me guess

[Hognoxious]

I feel confident saying that the quality of developers building their IIS core was certainly way better than an average developer found in the wild.

Why is it a pile of shit, then?

Re:Let me guess

[tibit]

Word itself, like many other GUI apps that handle formatted text delegates a lot of the raw typesetting to the video card and the selected printer driver.

It's amusing that you speak about it with such conviction yet it's all a fantasy, no less. Man, where did you get this "insight" from? Lest anyone be confused about it: fuck no .

Re:Nine Years?

[tibit]

This was a planned process and it took time for a reason. They did this slowly but surely. That's the only way to do it without blowing your budget many times over. I hope you recall that big software rewrites almost universally fail. This is a big infrastructure rewrite, it'd fail too if it were done in a "let's just rip it all at once" fashion. It's the same reason you need to be wary of many a company that grows too fast - usually it's internals can't keep up, and it'll eventually fail. Many companies failed just for not artificially limiting their growth. Southwest Airlines is a shining example that sometimes just artificially clipping your growth at 8% annually is a good thing to do :)

Re:Let me guess

[MightyMartian]

In my organization, the initial answer would probably have been "No, we don't need it." Decent open source LDAP and calendar servers with discrete apps would have been fine. But Exchange was installed because it had been paid for as part of the Backoffice/Outlook suite, and it's like a drug. Once you've got it, you can't get rid of it, even if 75% of its features never really get utilized. I once raised the possibility of going back to discrete scheduling and email solutions, and the response was pretty negative. "You mean we wouldn't use Outlook, or Outlook wouldn't quite function like it does now?" And that was that.

But I'm done. I'm one of the managing directors of the company now, and I've put my foot down. This is the last version of Exchange we'll install. We'll either go with something like Gmail or with a managed Exchange service when we look at the next upgrade cycle in five years. This is the last time I build and manage any kind of in-house email system.

Re:Let me guess

[Ol Olsoc]

It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange

THIS!

When the hell are those damn FOSS slowpokes going to get off their asses and write their own fucking ludicrous substitute for Exchange?

Re:Let me guess

[hairyfish]

Sounds like the problem exists between keyboard and chair. Not one piece of objective criticism in your post, just a fanboy rant about how you couldn't figure it out even though tens of thousands of others seem to having it working just fine. Exchange is the best of breed product in it's class, and most people with half a brain seem to get to work better than you. How you got modded +5 is beyond me. Oh that's right, this is Slashdot, incoherent MS bashing is standard fare here...

Re:Let me guess

[rdnetto]

My understanding is that they went with KDE. The KDE alternative to Exchange and Outlook is Kolab (server) and Kontact (client).
It has some enterprise use, though I don't know if it has the features you mention.