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London Council Dumping Windows For Chromebooks To Save £400,000
girlmad writes: "Google has scored a major win on the back of Microsoft's Windows XP support cut-off. The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham has begun moving all its employees over to Samsung Chromebooks and Chromeboxes ahead of the 8 April deadline. The council was previously running 3,500 Windows XP desktops and 800 XP laptops, and is currently in the process of retiring these in favour of around 2,000 Chromebooks and 300 Chromeboxes. It estimates the savings at around £400,000 compared to upgrading to newer Windows machines — no small change."
Translation: London Council trying to extort cheaper licenses out of Microsoft.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Are they trying to go around the (few) GCHQ monitoring limits by going straight into NSA-friendly territory?
Not exactly earth-shattering in scope. Look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
is for the diva to sing the operatic conclusion and for cats and dogs to get along.
Microsoft is so doomed. Who really needs them? Not most people.
Have you seen the latest Samsung tablets? Holy cow the better than Hi-def resolution, vivid colors, awesome performance, none of them running Windows, all of them running Android. I saw them recently and my first reaction was: Microsoft is so doomed.
Yeah, all except for that pesky near 90% desktop market share, and the millions of applications people rely on that use a Windows operating system to do their work. The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms, but make no mistake, Windows is still very firmly entrenched on the desktop. And regular old computers where people still need to get work done on a day to day basis is still a lucrative market, if not as sexy as phones and tablets. The fact that it makes Slashdot headlines when a company or government branch moves away from Windows tells you that it's not exactly happening all over the place either.
Not trying to sound like a shill here, but let's try to stay realistic. MS is going nowhere for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, they keep pissing off their desktop customers with garbage like Windows 8.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
2300 Chrome machines vs. 4300 XP machines, I wonder what the true saving are. Since the totals doesn't add up, what did they do eliminate 2000 workers and 2000 machines, or are they going to make 2000 workers use pen and paper or am I missing some here?
The really amazing thing is that one small Borough of London apparently employs over 2300 admin workers.
No wonder our taxes are so high.
You didn't read the article.
What they are actually doing is using Windows 7, and Office on virtual desktops and connecting using Citrix from Chomebooks.
The reduction in machines comes from employees only having a chrome books rather than a laptop and a desktop.
I highly doubt this will save any money the headline figure is probably due to different pots of money being used for different infrastructure.
Once upon a time, payroll and accounting ran on a mainframe. On punched cards, no less.
OK, so your current system runs on Windows. And you've a captive audience that has no choice but to use IE. A browser whose world-wide usage rate has been dropping for years.
Some day, it's possible that the CIO is going to come in and say "We're switching all our financials to Oracle. They gave us a real good deal on an Exadata server. Running Oracle Linux. And apps written in Oracle Java.
Nothing is forever in computers. Not even Windows. Although the time spent waiting on virus scans can certainly make it seem like forever.
Once upon a time, buggy whips had a large market share, too.
If you've ever sacrificed enough goats to divine the proper licensing you need to purchase from microsoft, you'll know the money they save /on software liscence cost alone/ will cover the hardware cost of even premium chromebooks 2 or 3 times over.
By the time you get done with Windows, Windows server, device/user CALS, Desktop services CALS, Systems management, etc hardware costs seem trivial.
Personally in our organization we like to save money but we also view buying a laptop as a very low cost expense. When an employee costs $100-$200k to employ (overhead, office space, janitorial, taxes, healthcare etc) a $1,000 system every 2 years or so is a tiny drop in the bucket.
At $150k / 40 hour weeks * 48 weeks = $79 per hour.
At that rate it only takes 10 hours of time savings before the computer (or $1,000 software) is "free". 10 hours sounds like a lot but if your employee has to wait 2 minutes a day for 2 years for a slow process you're looking at over $1,000 in wasted time. 2 minutes a day is a very very low bar for achievement.
Instead of trumpeting how much they saved on licensing fees, I would ask how much time they are saving--or are they? Is this just the IT department triumphantly cutting their budget or HR picking up the expense of extra employees to do the same work. That's the headline I would be interested in. If this saved them having 2 employees then they would save 400,000 pounds. If it meant they needed 3 more employees then they not only replaced the upgrade fees but actually increased their net budget.
I would suspect that WindowsRT like you say would probably be the easiest transition. I would argue that more than 2 minutes per day would be lost to Linux "hiccups" and confusion.
22% of U.S. School Districts using Chromebooks
Why Half of Our Company is Using Chromebooks
Chromebooks capture 20% of commercial notebooks
You don't do training with end-users much, do ya? ;-)
Putting Linux on the existing hardware would also make more sense ...
Perhaps for PC desktops but for PC laptops you are much more likely to have glitchy or unsupported hardware of some sort, ex. wifi.
And if Chrome doesn't work out you can install a full Linux on the chromebooks and you will have a complete and working set of drivers, there is a Linux under that Chrome.
oh no, we know.
We call this "lock ins", because its impossible to use anything else, even if what you have is pretty shitty. Windows might suck, but its the only thing that works for your specific software.
This is the only thing keeping windows, and for that matter, microsoft going. People don't like microsoft, they have to use it.
No, there is no short term solution.
Long term, microsoft is fucked, because when it launches new products, no one gives a fuck.
GroupWise? That can scale. eDirectory scales better than AD and Zenworks manages devices of many types Ooops. I got confused by daylight savings and had my watch set to 2004...
Since the other option was moving from XP to Windows 8, retraining was going to happen either way.
The count was reduced because some employees who had a laptop and a desktop will have just the laptop now. Probably because modern laptops are just as good as a desktop for many applications.
Moving from MSFT is a great move but jumping into Google's camp is a bad move. It's trading one set of evils/problems with another. A few years ago I would have said great move but Google lately has started to become a more smiling version of Apple and Microsoft and frankly is pushing their commercial interests above that of open computing. London Council can be proud of saving money but in a few years I think we'll be hearing another headline that they're switching to something else.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That thing that just about everyone else uses.
Isn't reality neat?
Required reading for internet skeptics
This is insightful?!
Exchange is a horribly bloated and slow piece of work, in the days before super-fast supercomputer server clusters, Exchange would handle relatively few users compared to a mail system (that, admittedly didn't do calendar or tasks or other crap no-one uses).
Active Directory is LDAP, with a few extra bits Microsoft wanted to lock you into. To think that LDAP is not scalable but Active Directory is, is laughable.
MS knowledge is cheap- - you can pay $16k a year and get a MCSE who is really not as competent as you think, who can do the basics but will fall down totally when things go south. Why else do you think good admins are expensive?
So, sorry.. your post is entirely trolling bullshit.
These are nearly all civil servants, not politicians. Since the boroughs do sanitation, roads, parks, etc., I'm sure there's a lot of systems to interface with.