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

Translation

[Torp]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."

Re:Translation

[asmkm22]

Yeah, I've never known MS to be flexible and helpful in the way he describes, so I'm guessing he's getting special treatment.

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:Translation

[fustakrakich]

Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?

Re:Translation

[Casandro]

Well, but a week long Exchange semi-outage still costs money, no matter what your support level is. (Happened at a large German manufacturer of household appliances) Microsoft software just doesn't seem to be enterprise ready.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft software just doesn't seem to be enterprise ready.
That's what the London Stock Exchange said a few years ago. Nothing new though, the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges switched to Linux a few years earlier. Somehow the stock exchanges found the total cost of ownership for Open Source to be lower. But what do they know about money...

Re:Translation

[ArmoredDragon]

Another thing to consider too though, is how long ago was he doing business with Microsoft? The reason I say that is because of this bit:

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.'

In other words, it's because of Linux that Microsoft has to step up its game and do better than it did in the past. Had it not been for Linux, Microsoft would behave more similar to how you expect government services to behave (think rude employees, long lines, and general disregard for customer service at the DMV.)

Re:Translation

[Jack Griffin]

Different environments from most businesses which just need file, email, web and a few app servers. I'm sure you can find any special use case to suit your argument, but the fact remains, for most people, most of the time, walking into an MS shop requires the least amount of effort. Try not to let you religious beliefs stand in the way of reality.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?

No, but I have seen plenty of big investors being fleeced by the bank. Normally with a to good to be true special offer. That's more or less directly Microsoft's standard MO. Every product will have a base set of decent features and for those features every box will be checked. There will even be an "Open" XML format that you will seen to be able to export your data to. The trick is that, built into your software will be some extra freebie small feature you can't escape from. Once your users start using that feature, they are hooked and can't escape. In the price of every Microsoft Word license you have to include the potential that it forces you to invest in an entire set of SharePoint servers and an outsourced support company. There are entire countries like the UK and South Korea (which had an ActiveX control as a key part of it's banking infrastructure!) which have been tricked by this. Double doesn't even come close.

Re:Translation

[rioki]

Apps, apps apps.

Basically the Windows / Unixlikes divide has little to do with actual technology. If you have lots of servers, the license costs add up and chances are you are running custom apps. If you develop your own apps, the target OS matters little. But if you intend to buy applications, windows is the go to OS. The license costs for the OS pale in comparison to the cost of developing the application for a different OS.

Re:Translation

[Chas]

Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?

Only when the bathroom is full.

Re:Translation

[DaveV1.0]

Congratulations. Rather than actually deal with the truth, you just accuse the man of unethical conduct. That makes you a lying piece of fanboy shit. And, it is the exact kind of shit you are spewing that shows the attitude alluded to by the article. I have used FLOSS for about 25 years now and while everyone talks about community and how much help is available, the truth is the most common answer to a question asked of the community is silence, followed closely by "RTFM, n00b!", "Stop your shit questions and use Google", and other such helpful responses.

With MS, they can go to MS and MS will bend over backwards to help them. What do they get with FLOSS? Well, they can try to find someone who is competent, but who do they go to and how do they find out? I guess they could use Red Hat, but I have worked with Red Hat and know what you get for that support contract.

And, I know this is going to get modded down by FLOSS fanboys and I don't care. You fuckers need to hear the truth. Just look at the non-confrontational responses that have been modded troll. The troll post is Torp's.

But, hey, don't let the fact that Torp is making shit up because you fuckers like his opinion solely because it feeds into your delusions. Go fuck yourselves.

Re:Translation

[BVis]

How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.

The quality of the product only matters until they achieve lock-in. After that, they don't care if the program even runs.

Re:Translation

[Medievalist]

The trick is that, built into your software will be some extra freebie small feature you can't escape from. Once your users start using that feature, they are hooked and can't escape.

Our users are tricked into using software with features they like and actually make their jobs easier! What a dastardly move by Microsoft in actually making a product that the end user prefers! How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.

Sometimes is really is like that, although it happens just as often with non-Microsoft (or even, gasp! free) sorftware as with anything else. The reality is that quality of code and product aren't determined by brand names; IIS and WinXP are both Microsoft products despite their vast differences in quality and user experience.

So, that being said, Microsoft's biggest wedge in corporate settings is Outlook, which incorporates such "features" as training the user to use a semicolon to separate addresses, in violation of all standards and common sense, and egregiously mangling RFC822 email addresses. Users (some of whom may well reply to this post) will insist that this is totally reasonable and desirable - because they are at least as brainwashed as your average emacs user.

Humans want to root for a team and the quality of software products has almost nothing to do with it. It's like Democrats .vs. Republicans, tastes great .vs. less filling, etc.... not evidence-based.

True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

'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.

Re:True Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

"virtually ANY change is highly disruptive"... you mean like replacing heirarchical menus with a dog's breakfast ribbon?

Re:True Costs

[bloodhawk]

Outlook nowadays is far more than just a mail client, in a properly configured environment it integrates everything from your mail, calendaring, lync, voice and collaboration. currently their is no easy match for a correctly configured outlook desktop experience for many users.

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...

Recruiting policy

[hcs_$reboot]

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.

Re:Recruiting policy

[_Shad0w_]

He's the CIO for a county council, when he says "staff" he means office staff and he's talking about Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows for the desktop. His entire IT department probably fits in one fairly small room. I'm frankly impressed they haven't just outsourced the whole of their IT management; it's how councils here usually seem to work. Come to think of it's it's quite possible they have and he's actually the only person who works for the council directly.

Re:Recruiting policy

[msobkow]

No, instead you have the end of support for even LTS releases, and then you're hooped if the upgrade doesn't work.

Open source is definitely not superior to Windows in that regard.

I have yet to work for a company big enough to be rolling their own updates and patches, even though anyone could, in theory, do so.

Re:Recruiting policy

[phantomfive]

I don't know, there's a guy here on Slashdot who still supports software built on Motif, without any problem. That's the equivalent of being built on Mac Classic. And it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Bert64]

There's thousands of people out there who will claim to have windows knowledge, and the vast majority of them don't have the first clue. So you'd end up with an extremely poorly configured network just limping along (as happens in many places)...

Theres a lot less people claiming linux/unix knowledge, but the vast majority of those who make such claims actually do have such knowledge, and experience, and in many cases its a genuine interest for them rather than a 9-5 job.

Finding competent windows engineers is generally *harder* than finding competent unix engineers simply because you have many more incompetent ones to sort through first. And generally the most competent people have experience of multiple systems anyway because one of the key differentiators is that someone highly competent will do proper research and use the best tool for the job at hand, rather than just using what they're most comfortable with or what they think is expected.

Re:Recruiting policy

[Savage-Rabbit]

I don't know, there's a guy here on Slashdot who still supports software built on Motif, without any problem. That's the equivalent of being built on Mac Classic. And it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

I support a few Motif apps at work. but what is this "without any problem" phenomenon you speak of?

Re:Recruiting policy

[Xest]

You really don't have the slightest clue about what a council does or how big it's operations are do you?

I used to work for a council doing IT support. There are many things wrong with working for a council in terms of the fact it will sap your soul as you watch people get promoted based on whether they're over 60 and need to be given a higher paying job to pump up their final salary pension, or whether you generally just give a shit about doing a good job and get that beaten out of you because anyone who suggests improvements is shot down as a shit stirrer.

But I'll give them credit, one thing they're not is small operations, and if I took absolutely nothing else away from working there I did at least take away the fact that it was one of the more interesting networks I ever got to work on for it's sheer scale. Few private sector businesses give you the experience of scale and number of distributed sites and the level of network management that goes with that as a local council can.

We had around 10,000 desktop computers and laptops to support, we had a network that spanned many hundreds of distributed, and sometimes quite distant sites. You had fairly complex active directory setups because there was originally (later amalgamated) multiple IT teams - one for education, one for central services, one for social housing and so forth with a forest containing a top level domain run by central services and the other departments own domains branching off that. We had 100mbps pipes running from 170 schools to a central location that had it's own connection to the internet as well as a link to janet. You had links to youth centres, satellite offices for social services, for social housing and so on and so forth. Infrastructure for handling customer complaints, for managing property boundary data of every house in the district, for managing the births and deaths registers, for running elections and god knows what else.

As an aside, well, actually, more on topic, Microsoft invests a lot of time and money into wooing councils because they are such massive customers. 10,000 Windows and Office licenses and a hundred or more Windows server licenses as well as tons of exchange and SQL server licenses amongst other things is nothing to scoff at. Especially when there are hundreds of such local authorities in the UK meaning the net worth to Microsoft of capturing as much of UK public sector as possible is in the many hundreds of millions range at very least. I overheard our head of IT joking with a Microsoft salesman once about how they both fiddle expenses buying themselves more expensive meals and hotel rooms and services than necessary. My boss was set on a trip to Reading where Microsoft entertained them at a bar, with good time girl stood around using the sexual desperation of your average old boys club council manager to buy them over. Yes this shit really does actually happen.

A quick Google shows Hampshire County Council has around 40,000 employees. Some of these will be folks like bin men, but this larger than the council I worked for even, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have around 20,000 - 30,000 computers for those staff.

Councils are offloading a lot of services to private sector now, either selling them off, or just outsourcing the services. But the majority of councils still do IT in house.

I'm a developer nowadays working in private sector and am far happier for it, but if there's one thing local councils IT departments are generally not, it's small backroom operations.

Re:Mathematics

[guacamole]

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.

Linux developer arrogance

[Eravnrekaree]

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.

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).

Possibly.

[khasim]

"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."

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?

Re:Mod parent up

[armanox]

I'm going to have to agree with your idea on this one - the GNU ideology is the problem. I don't care about all the politics that RMS does - I want stuff to work. I like a lot of things about Linux, but when it comes down to it, Solaris, BSD, and IRIX are all just as nice for what I'm after.

Which has lead me to advocate against desktop/laptop Linux, and I've even moved away from it on some of my personal servers (work is all still RHEL and Windows, which I can at least count on RHEL 6 to work for quite a while.

Re: Windows Linux for small business

[TheMiddleRoad]

1. Track changes is 10 times easier in Word.
2. Auto correct works infinitely better in Word.
3. Formatting doesn't translate well. Sure, if you've got plain text, you're fine. Add some formatting, though, and you'll have page breaks in all sorts of odd places.

Then there's Excel, which is far, far easier to use than the Libre version. Sometimes it's the little things, like hitting enter and having the selected box move not just down a line but back to the left when you're entering multiple columns and rows of data. Sometimes it's the ease of sorting. Libre Office is pitiful in comparison. Oh, and Libre Office has terrible xls and xlsx compatibility. Basic files had ruined formatting.

Libre Office is ready for prime time for people who don't actually get work done with Office. I'm sure your religious dragging of people away from Office has ended with more than a couple people silently cursing your name every second they do work. But hey, what's an extra thousand clicks a day, right? Every day, for years.

...and that costs?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:depends on your application.

[Jack Griffin]

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)

Re:Not really

[rioki]

Github went down? Did not notice that. I checked the status and yes, they had a few hiccups in the last months. But in each case the issue was resolved in under an hour and in most cases it was only a minor glitch. I don't know what is less "enterprise ready" that this type of reliability.

Also in the case of git, when the central public repository is down, that does not mean you can't work. Compare that to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, the entire company grinds to a halt when these systems go down and I have seen my fair share of downtime.

Re:You can't drown if you're a fish

[rioki]

Yes, like commercial software is such a bastion of good quality software with no vulnerabilities at all.

Re:Mod parent up

[serviscope_minor]

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?

"De-risk ongoing cost"

[Chris Mattern]

I want this person arrested for aggravated assault on the English language, immediately.

Lock-in?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

In the price of every Microsoft Word license you have to include the potential that it forces you to invest in an entire set of SharePoint servers and an outsourced support company.

How exactly would that happen? I don't think I've ever seen a SP server actually deployed in any organisation I've worked in, from a tiny local business to one of the largest corps in the world. Most of them were Microsoft customers, though.

I did, however, spend about 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to do some simple data manipulation in LibreOffice Calc at an organisation that didn't use MS Office. 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.

It's not a popular sentiment around here, but I suspect the CIO is right about going with Microsoft even without any undisclosed deal, at least in major sectors like office software. The organisation where I was working yesterday picked LibreOffice on cost grounds, but the money lost to silly inefficiencies like the terrible on-line help system I mentioned above would pay for a copy of MS Office within weeks, if not days or hours.

You're right to express concern about proprietary data formats like the MS Office file formats, but the reality is that right now MS Office is widely used and you often have to be compatible with their formats anyway to communicate effectively. So either your alternative software can read MS formats, in which case the lock-in problem doesn't exist, or you can't, in which case your alternative comes with a serious limitation before you even start.

Re:Lock-in?

[higuita]

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.

Re:Lock-in?

[Nemesisghost]

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.

Re:Lock-in?

[MightyYar]

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?

Re:Lock-in?

[bkr1_2k]

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.

Re:Lock-in?

[crtreece]

Did you read the very next line?

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