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."

Comments

Translation

[MightyMartian]

Translation: London Council trying to extort cheaper licenses out of Microsoft.

Re:Translation

[Shimbo]

It doesn't sound like they're using web apps, at least not yet

No, but they were (apparently) using mostly Citrix apart from the power users. A Chromebook seems a good fit as a remote desktop client; you don't have any more issues with requiring an always on network than you started with. For once, a fairly sensible strategy it seems.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

If using a Chromebook as a remote terminal, that makes sense, assuming a decent connection to Citrix. It means one less security issue (stolen/compromised laptops) to worry about. There is still security required when people have to log on, but that can be accomplished via SecurID or another 2FA system.

Re:Translation

[gbjbaanb]

actually no. RTFM: London council dumping their old remote terminal and web browsing desktop machines with shiny new remote terminal and web browsing machines. Shiny new machines that are significantly cheaper.

They are also buying new Windows 7 PCs for specialist apps that don't run over RDP.

One thing to note: Windows 8 was not even considered (Mac and Linux considered but not chosen, due to the particular use-case they needed)

Re:All that is left

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:All that is left

[RabidReindeer]

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.

Chromebooks for Business ..

[DTentilhao]

22% of U.S. School Districts using Chromebooks

Why Half of Our Company is Using Chromebooks

Chromebooks capture 20% of commercial notebooks