Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says

colinneagle (2544914) writes "Jos Creese, CIO of the Hampshire County Council, told Britain's 'Computing' publication that part of the reason is that most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products and that Microsoft has been flexible and more helpful. 'Microsoft has been flexible and helpful in the way we apply their products to improve the operation of our frontline services, and this helps to de-risk ongoing cost,' he told the publication. 'The point is that the true cost is in the total cost of ownership and exploitation, not just the license cost.' Creese went on to say he didn't have a particular bias about open source over Microsoft, but proprietary solutions from Microsoft or any other commercial software vendor 'need to justify themselves and to work doubly hard to have flexible business models to help us further our aims.'"

Comments

Re:Translation

[msobkow]

You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.

Re:Mod parent up

[Billly Gates]

This is why myself and Hairfeet no longer support Linux for average users.

I do admit I was more of a FreeBSD bigot but after 5 and 6 were so bad and I stayed with 4.x all the way to 4.12 I kind of gave up :-(

I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers. I WANT THEM TO JUST WORK. Why can't apps just work between versions like MacOSX, Solaris, FreeBSD with the compat libs, and even Windows?

I can click on a setup.exe from the XP era and unless it is a horribly written business app requiring local admin (more like win98 style written) it will run on Windows 8 no problem.

Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.

Socialist ideology about everyone that is closed source is harmful I know lets purposedly not include a stable ABi so things break when I do an apt-get update to force ATI and NVidia will just work. That is the ticket.

These companies are still struggling to make win 7 compatible apps and only care about the latest versions. My ATI drivers from 2011 will not work on a modern distro., Therefore I am choosing Windows and sticking to Linux for a VM. I might piss some some Slashdot moderators but I speak the truth. Why can't a stable ABI and API exist so one thing can just work? It is freaking 2014?

Re:not about cost in my oppinion

[sjames]

It says cost, but the whole of TFAs boil down to MS is big and you can't depend on small vendors just because. So, ignoring Red Hat (reason not given) and IBM (reason not given), there are no large vendors of Linux. QED(ish, sorta).

Re:True Costs

[Vlado]

That may be your experience, but it's not something that I've seen since the times of Office XP.

I develop lots of training materials that go through people on all sides of the planet in their revision/editing process. It's not very unusual for some to have Office 2008, others 2010 and some 2012. In all cases I do not remember formatting problems to occur. And that includes different regional settings and so forth.

And I'm not even sure what you meant with the printer drivers...

Re:Lock-in?

[crtreece]

Did you read the very next line?

Choose Format - Font Size