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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.'"
"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
'The point is that the true cost is in the total cost of ownership and exploitation, not just the license cost.'
Yeah, exploitation IS a cost. That's why I don't use Windows.
most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products
So the guy hires Microsoft compliant engineers and surprisingly they're most efficient on MS products. What isn't said is that probably that guy himself has always been a Windows user, and thus he prefers to hire windowsians. And there... I am not surprised. How would you feel hiring Linux people when yourself you don't have a clue about what it does and how it works. The thing is, Linux engineers would have no problem learning Windows stuff, while the opposite is more seldom. Hiring engineers interested in open source, Linux, openness in general would be more profitable for the company in the longer term, though.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The cost of a Windows and Office license is quite high.
Just as many others, you haven't gotten yet the main point of the article. The cost of the software license is often a relatively small part of the cost of using software. Training the users is also part of these costs.
And by the way, the effective cost of Windows and Office licenses to businesses, government, and universities is much lower than the listed MSRP. When I worked in IT, the license prices was the last thing that worried us. The guy who did installations and setup probably charged more than what the software actually cost to buy.
I am a supporter of Linux and open source and truly want it to be a success. I admit, however, that sometimes the arrogance of Linux developers is holding Linux back from acceptance. Such as refusal to have a compatability layer for binary driver compatability between kernel versions and the refusal to allow users to use binary drivers. For instance, I have heard that many Linux developers wanted to drop support for floppy disks, "because few Linux developers have floppy drives", despite there being tons of floppies around that users may need to access. THat says it all about the mentality of some Linux developers, they dont care about users, are arrogant, live in a bubble, are elitist and sort of think of Linux as their private club and sort of want it to be hard to use, because it makes them feel special since they are able to endure the pain of using it.
Possibly. But there's enough weasel-room to reach his claims without that.
1. Lock-in: If his systems are already running MS software (which they probably are) is the cost of data migration counted against MS or is it counted against any alternative?
2. Hiring/Training: Is his office paying for training and certification OR is his office REQUIRING that anyone applying ALREADY have certification.
3. Discounts: Once you have 1 & 2, is Microsoft offering discounts just big enough to come in under the cost of migration?
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.
Man, I'd be happy if we could get a commitment to source-level backwards compatibility; let alone binary compatibility. Some of those library developers are vicious in culling old programs.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Really... I don't ever recall being able to open ANY MS word document in LO or OO correctly, when the document contained absolutely any kind of special formatting and was more than just simple text. Sure, it will open just fine in the editor, but the formatting, especially for any embedded content such as images, will always be fucked up.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It seriously amazes me how little thought many geeks give the "it's open so anyone can support it!" argument. Seriously? You think that anyone can just sit down, read the source of a complex project, and fix and maintain it? It is just that easy?
Of course not. You need not just a programmer, but a good team and they can't be idiots. Maintaining something as large as an OS is a big job. So if the primary developers aren't doing it any more, you have to hire someone else to do it. So what's that cost? You can't ignore that, pretend like it isn't a real business cost just like software licenses.
Also there's the overall cost of sticking with something really old. This bitching about XP upgrades is silly because, by and large, the systems that need the upgrade are extremely old (I'm an IT support guy by profession). So if you took the route of paying to maintain this extremely old software on extremely old hardware it could end up costing you a lot in the long run in terms of productivity, as well as support.
Heck we've seen this in large scale systems like mainframes. IBM will generally support a mainframe as long as you like... for a price. You get companies running shit so old it is exceedingly expensive for the maintenance contract, and it is inflexible and has trouble dealing with their current business needs because it was designed 30 years ago. An upgrade would be a much better use of resources.
We even have a situation like that at work. We have an old Netapp FAS that we are still paying support on. 250GB SATA drives, no upgrade path. The support contract is multiple thousands a year, and getting higher. Netapp is happy to take our money and keep ti running but it can't run the new OnTap, can't take larger disks, etc, etc. The right answer, the one we are doing soon (hopefully) is to replace it with a new unit, migrate the data, and stand it down. Ya it is a bit of work, but it will be cheaper AND better in the long run.
Maintenance, upgrades, lifecycles, these are things you deal with for anything, software included. If you really think it is a feasible idea to just maintain a version of Linux forever, you are kidding yourself.
Also if you are wondering what long term maintenance of Linux costs, check out RHEL sometime. See what a support contract for a heavily supported, stable, Linux runs you. Then consider that MS has the same lifecycle on their OSes.
Last MS Exchange deployment I did (years ago) ran about $4k for the server license and about $100 per user (from memory). And that server could run up to 1000 mailboxes. Expected life of an Exchange Server (software) can be well over 5 years, so you're talking peanuts per year. It isn't even worth arguing the license cost. The biggest benefit is Exchange Admins are a dime a dozen, and if they go away I can get a guy from any of the millions of IT support companies to walk in off the street and maintain it with no issue. Good luck having that same business continuity with your home-brew flavour-of-the-day Linux distro that some neck beard has setup his own unique config that needs an equally ugly neck beard to try and decipher if he happens to leave the business. Never mind arguing the user interface issues from some flaky email client that doesn't do the half the stuff Outlook does seamlessly, and doesn't plug-in to all the cool cloud stuff everyone has these days (Salesforce, dropbox etc). Say what you want about everything else MS, but Exchange and Outlook are a best of breed product (ignoring your single use case and taking into account how real businesses use email/collab apps)
Yes, like commercial software is such a bastion of good quality software with no vulnerabilities at all.
Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs!
The linux developers feel that having a stable API would have to make them compromise features in the kernel because they'd be unable to change the internals when needed.
Funny no other platform has this problem with them.
Funny how Linux is the most high performance kernel out there. It's no coincidence that it runs everything from your dinky little home router through your phone, internet srevers and up to the top supercomputer in the world.
I'd say they clearly made the right choice.
As another handy feature since almost all drivers are in tree, this means that old hardware is usually supported on new kernels just fine. Unlike Windows: I've used perfectly functional sheet feed scanners abandoned by their owners because they don't have drivers for Windows 7 or 8.
Some of those library developers are vicious in culling old programs.
Are you talking about the Linux kernel or applications?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Have you open a bug in libreoffice about the online-help problem? If they aren't informed about the problems, for sure no one will fix it.
Higuita
But that's just it. For an organization to have to report that something is broken means it's not worth the cost, even if that cost is free. In addition, bug reporting is fine when you are a technical person. But think about those who actually make the decisions, they usually aren't technical and will be unwilling to report that something is broken beyond the guy who convinced them to use a broken product. And that phone call/meeting will end up with the decision maker demanding that they spend the money so at least he can have something that works, if not the entire organization.
It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.
What a coincidence! I've had the same experience with MS Office! Help is by default set to "online" and the search function is so poor that I usually don't bother and instead just Google it.
In all fairness, MS Office is so popular that Google usually has the solution. Why write a decent help system when you have whole sites dedicated to sorting out how to use your software?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So people don't ever have to report bugs to Microsoft? I think you and I live in different worlds because we report them routinely, to all of our vendors, whether we paid for the software or it was free.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."