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The Man Behind Munich's Migration of 15,000 PCs From Windows To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "It's one of the biggest migrations in the history of Linux, and it made Steve Ballmer very angry: Munich, in southwest Germany, has completed its transition of 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux. It has saved money, fueled the local economy, and improved security. Linux Voice talked to the man behind the migration: 'One of the biggest aims of LiMux was to make the city more independent. Germany’s major center-left political party is the SPD, and its local Munich politicians backed the idea of the city council switching to Linux. They wanted to promote small and medium-sized companies in the area, giving them funding to improve the city’s IT infrastructure, instead of sending the money overseas to a large American corporation. The SPD argued that moving to Linux would foster the local IT market, as the city would pay localcompanies to do the work.' (Linux Voice is making the PDF article free [CC-BY-SA] so that everyone can send it to their local councilors and encourage them to investigate Linux)."
At this point I am surprised that any government would trust a compiled OS that they can't effectively scan for any ease dropping code, intentional back doors or just vulnerabilities. Sure they can monitor the network to see if it is doing something obvious, but with a compiled OS it could be wide open to be compromised with either a back door or some code to send data off someplace and you would likely never know it. At least with Linux you can maintain your own verified version based on the source code. Of course even with wide open source code you get security issues... like openssl. But without the source code there could be a thousand of those types of vulnerabilities and only insiders at Microsoft could know about them. Maybe for most people it is a non-issue, but for governments and large corporations that level of pants around the ankles situation can have very big implications to national security and the economy.
This was not a decision based on cost, it was based on functionality - being able to invest in their platform and implement exactly what they wanted was worth the additional expense, in large part because they committed to investing the money that would have gone towards US license fees into the local economy.
Ken
Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any.
It's lack of pedantry.
Any large-scale deployment takes significant man-hours to achieve, but can be made easier through the use of imaging and common platforms. If I standardize on only a handful of models of computers then I can load-up the OS and build everything that I need for that OS on each model, then simply duplicate the drive over all of the others of that model, change the few things that need to be changed (name, network credentials, possibly some security hashes) and I'm done.
This is arguably even easier in Linux than in Windows because there are no particular licensing issues with just copying a Linux installation or with how many Linux installations are deployed. One's backend servers are now for updating and package management rather than for licensing.
And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now, coupled with competing UIs from Apple and Google, it's much easier to change people to a diffrent platform when they have to learn a new UI anyway. Had Microsoft kept variants of the Windows 95 UI going past Windows 7 then it would be harder, but with the Metro debacle it's a lot easier to make that change, and since most users won't go deeper than the UI anyway it's not so bad.
The hardest part is training the support staff if they've been Windows-centric their whole careers. Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
... but they're also taking care of the citizens screwed by the XP-end-of-life:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...
.
If GNU/Linux is too detailed, then why don't people just call it GNU then?
A few reasons:
1) People prefer easy to use names. "GNU/Linux" is an awkward mouthful, "Linux" is a nice simple name. For the same reason people refer to the "Tesla Model S" as "Model S", or simply a "Tesla", since the S is the more common model here.
2) "Linux" has been the most commonly used name from day 1, and that's not going to change, for the same reason that the public will continue to take "hacker" to mean someone who breaks into computer systems.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If only the linux community could come up with some kind of "packaging" mechanism that would make software deployment easier.
This "package" could be comprised of compressed files that the OS could then "copy" to relevant locations on the system. I don't want to get to Star Treked out but perhaps we could then send these "packages" over the network to computers, instead of manually copying the files on our tape drives like we do right now.
If only Red Hat or one of the other distros had a system like this in place, it would make Linux so much more competitive. Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Open Source Advocates Angry at German Gov't Decision
May 13, 2011
The German Foreign Office first started using Linux as a server platform in 2001 before making Linux and open source software their default desktop choice in 2005. Most observers thought the move a success. However, the government will now transition back to Windows XP, to be followed by Windows 7, also dropping OpenOffice and Thunderbird in favor of MS Office and Outlook.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
You conveniently left out this part of the article:
In the short term - they would have saved. However over the 10+ years since initial migration, they've saved and estimated 10 million Euros:
Here is an english article discussing that publicly released report. For the actual german report. see here
And you took that out of context. That was on the initial 5 year plan, where moving to linux was a big migration, while moving to windows XP from windows 2000 would have had far less impact.
So of course in the first years such a massive migration and education of your users costs more. But now 10+ years later they estimate they saved money (and that was also mentioned in the part where they mentioned that linux was more expensive. For the 5 year plan microsoft was cheaper, but strategically they were pretty sure linux would be cheaper after that).
And that was the reason to do it this way.
Same money to local people, not to corps that move profits thru double Irish with a side of Denmark , so they don't pay any local taxes.
Now you understand ?
They could have saved a lot of money just by threatening plausibly to switch to GNU/Linux.
Microsoft is known to be very forthcoming when people start considering alternatives. "We'll give you the Ballmers and Chains for free. You'll just pay for the thumbscrews later on. And you'll get a sweet deal for rack-mounted whatevers to boot."
For the same reason you ride an escalator up and down floor levels, you take aspirin as a pain killer, and you store your hot beverage in a thermos.
It's not a genericised trademark, per se, but the term "Linux" is now used to describe the whole, incorrect or not.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Even if it did cost more it would be better to spend the money in your own country rather than send it all over seas.
So of course in the first years such a massive migration and education of your users costs more.
Yep, higher cost, but the money stayed in the local economy. IMHO, that's the most important aspect of all, even if it had cost more after 5 years.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Because GNU's Not Unix, but Linux is very like Unix.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I think they made a smart decision that keeps their money in their borders, but the "calculations" as the main proponent of the migration used are really bent towards Linux.
Just one example would be that he considered the cost and effort to retrain people from Windows XP to Linux and the cost and effort to train people to already using XP to Windows 7 would be equal.
That's ridiculous.
Again, it's a smart decision, but not because of saving money - but instead keeping the money circulating in your own economy. It may ultimately save money due to increased tax revenues but that's a tough one to figure.
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Sounds like a straw man argument to me. Why would a single organization need a system able to run on many different configurations, when the goal of most organizations is to run as few configurations as possible?
Ezekiel 23:20
many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths
Wait, really?
There are IT professionals who have trouble with the idea that /home/entropius/widgets is a subdirectory of /home/entropius, and so on?
even you,
even RMS,
or else you would not be telling everyone what we really mean is GNU/Linux.
It's here it works get used to it.
At the same time I also understand your frustration with the fast and loose nature of our language usage
Like so many things it's just human nature, you want to fix something help fix humans, after all someone is going to be releasing the first patches for the human genome soon,
I for one hope it's open source....
I think you're just trolling. Seriously? You're annoyed that common usage of a term has diverged from its original correct usage? Better rip out about 90% of your dictionary and burn it then. So operating systems using the Linux kernel have become known as Linux in common parlance; how infuriating. I tell you, I am completely fascinated to know what other earth-threatening evils are giving you ulcers right now.
Oh no... it's the future.
1. Initial costs of staying with Microsoft's software were lower.
2. Customizable security was one of the pros of switching to Linux.
3. Initial costs were projected over 5 years.
4. 10 years have now past and the city made an assesment of cost. Conclusion was 10 mllion euros saved.
5. HP made there own analysis and concluded that the Linux conversion had cost the city 60 million Euros more. However, when contacted for their methodology and numbers for the analysis, they declined to provide the information.
yeh, right, just because all those problems never happen in windows!!
and it is really just the reverse of what you said. Linux support better older hardware, when it gives errors, is easier to debug and if you have any problem, is a lot easier to verify the system (file checksum, OS and hardware) remotely and clone and replace the faulty desktop if needed. If it is a HD problem, you can even create a fallback network boot to keep the user working (slower, but working) until someone replaces the HD.
Higuita
I think you have it reversed. The OS was originally called "Linux", and it included a kernel, GNU user space tools, MIT's X-windows system, some BSD api's, and later Apache web servers, etc. There was a Linux kernel, but also an entire Linux distro.
It was only years later that RMS tried to retroactively name someone else's project with his organization's name, and that's one reason there's resistance there. Now the Linux kernel has "kernel" dropped and people try to say "Linux" only refers to that part. Ok, whatever. It's just RMS politics. People can name their distro whatever they want. But don't pretend GNU/Linux is a more "correct" way to refer to anything-- it's just a brand.
E pluribus unum
It's not hard finding hardware with excellent linux support, even less so when you buy in the large quantities that the city of Munich do, you do realise that organisations of that size tend to have just a small set of laptop and desktop configurations they use, right? It is not like they randomly pick 10 different manufacturers and 50 models.
While there might be valid arguments against their move to Linux, your is definitely not one of them.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Bravo
Because Linux is the name of the kernel and also the name used to call distributions of Linux (the kernel). Context normally makes it clear what the word means and if necessary it is appropriately qualified. Whereas GNU/Linux is just sour grapes.
There are IT professionals who have trouble with the idea that /home/entropius/widgets is a subdirectory of /home/entropius, and so on?
Well, what drive is it on? Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in? Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
MS tried that...
It didn't fly.
Nearly everyone fights change. In the absence of good reasons, MS will desperately push out slanted, factually incorrect studies with huge omissions. And it works. Local governments gratefully seize on these as the excuses to keep their old Windows systems.
Software is a big excuse. For example, somehow, computers in the public library can't simply be connected to the Internet, no. They have to have nannyware. On further inquiry, it turns out that such software has to be approved, and approval is a lengthy process. Naturally, the approved nannyware is Windows only. (What nannyware is there for Linux?) They will wax poetic about how they don't want the town to be sued because Little Johnny saw something inappropriate on a computer at the library. Yes, Little Johnny's eyes are why they can't switch away from Windows, even in the back office in city hall.
The most likely way to get the local politicians and bureaucrats to move on something like that is to make them more afraid of not doing it. Repeat, over and over, that Windows is much less secure. Ask them if they'd enjoy being sued because Big John had his passwords intercepted on a library computer. Or sued because hackers broke into their database and got all their information about property owners in the town. Would they enjoy being another Target? Saving money also gets their attention, but not as much as fear.
You'd think that the military, an organization that is under constant attack, would want more security than Windows has. Maybe more than plain Linux, maybe SELinux, or OpenBSD. Or make their own, which they can afford to do. But no. The soldiers are mostly young men who grew up with PCs that had Windows installed. The officers will argue that it is also important that soldiers be able to do their jobs, and that's why they have to have Windows, because that's what they know. Train them on other OSes? Never! The officers aren't experts with computers either, and will demand contradictory and downright stupid things of any proposed replacement. They will also want to be in control, and try to keep everything secret, thus virtually guaranteeing that any project they launch will fail. Though they have the resources, their ability to make their own is poor. Another excuse in the US is the home grown argument. MS is American, Linux is not. Who knows what hacks some foreigners might have inserted in Linux, as if, unlike MS's code, they can't check the source themselves, and as if MS never outsources any software engineering work or hires foreigners.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Like companies should do instead of outsourcing to other countries?
Outsourcing should be illegal, it's killing nice paying jobs (and the economy, but MBAs and PHBs don't think long-term anymore)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
??? no scalable tools???
Where do you think Microsoft got theirs?
LDAP, Kerberos, DNS...
I've worked with UNIX systems for 40 years now. And with thousands of machines is trivially doable once there is an organization standardization to do so.
Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?
Amazon has a provisional patent for this in the pipeline I hear.
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"Windows is the only complete system able to run userland on so many different configurations."
And it's a wonder it's not more unstable with all those possible configurations. Besides, companies tend to have identical or similar models, makes imaging easier...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
They were faced with a "massive" migration to either WinXP or Linux, on a cost-basis, MS was cheaper - functionality-wise, benefit to the community Linux was superior, and they choose Linux.
I didn't judge the decision, I simply reported what was written in the article. Personally, I think they made an excellent choice by keeping the money local, even if it was greater than the foreign (MS) option.
I discussed their decision, and when they made their decision Linux was the more expensive option and they took it.
Ken
More money, but to local people.
Ken
Sometimes organizational goals don't match organizational realities.
Did Munich buy 15,000 identical desktops & laptops for all users, and will perform similar massive (government-wide) forklift upgrades going forward, or will new models be brought in over time, creating an ever-changing mix of systems?
My corporate IT background tells me the latter is more likely, but hey, maybe Munich is different.
Ken
At the cost of maintaining your own IT department or an ongoing contract with a third party.
Even with the source code, there could be vulnerabilities - that nobody knows about. Look how long Heartbleed existed before it was discovered more-or-less by happenstance.
TANSTAAFL.
... cannot be achieved without open standards, and open standards in computing can only be guaranteed through Open Source.
Support of older hardware is a meaningless metric, will the city of Munich be purposefully running older hardware bought surplus/off-lease, or will they buy current hardware going forward? Systems have a certain useful life, and buying machines mid-way through their useful life, while extremely cost-effective, can result in more frequent hardware swaps/upgrades, increasing labor costs but each iteration will cost less.
Put simply, let's say a given laptop has a five-year useful life, buying a laptop that is three years old doesn't extend the useful life of the laptop out to eight years, you are instead buying the last 2-3 years of it's useful life.
Ken
Well, what drive is it on?
There's no worring about C: or D: or E: in Linux. It's all one filesystem.
Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?
What makes you think it is?
Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Some might say that DOS/Windows is using the wrong ones because Unix-style paths' predate the use of "\" by Windows.
And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now...,
You've hit on what I consider to be Microsoft's biggest problem: they are no longer making basic functional improvements to their products. Instead, they are adding bells and whistles, and changing file formats to force upgrades (if your clients have ver XYZ+1, then you need it to read the default format of the files they send you).
To me, this indicates a change in attitude. No longer are they striving to put out the best software, they're churning revs to keep revenue up. It's a sign of desperation and it has been going on for several years, now.
Munich is in South-East Germany. Google Maps isn't that hard to use, is it? :)
Canonical offers a comprehensive management suite for desktops and servers, that in may ways compares with Windows AD and associated tools. Canonical charges about $200-250/system per year (I assume volume discounts are available, but I'm not privy to them), while annual software license costs for most MS software users is well under that number (for example, schools can get client OS license, MS Office, server CALs, and misc other MS software for $35/desktop per year).
There are other options, including "roll-your-own", but when considering 15,000 desktops the task can become overwhelming and take a number of years to fully design and implement, and what to do during that transition period?
Ken
Just because you keep repeating that, doesn't make it true you know...
The article at the point where it's mentioned that it's most expensive immediately states it is due to the 5 year plan, and sorry, but a migration of win2k -> winxp (where you can keep most apps you were using, and most users will still be fairly familiar, and tech support won't need to learn much new things) vs windows -> linux where just about everything changes just isn't the same order of magnitude.
They also continue to say further on in the article that by their own estimates they saved money by now (about 12 years later?).
So stop your trolling (or work on your reading comprehension, it's seriously lacking)
And i almost feel like a karmawhore/linux fanboy when responding to you (even though i'm a happy windows 8 user)
Linux is a kernel. Why do people continue to call GNU/Linux (i.e. the whole system) To me it's like if you were to call the Tesla Model S "Goodyear" or something because it had Goodyear tires.
Well if you're going for a car analogy then Linux is obviously the engine, not the tires so you're painfully trying to avoid the flaws in your own argument. And GNU is not the rest, not for the user. What they see is the chassis and the interior. which might be called KDE or GNOME or XFCE. GNU is more like the gearbox, suspension and steering column - you wouldn't want to try to drive without them but to most people they're just hidden middleware. And it's what everybody has and uses, would you say "I've bought myself a new car with windshield wipers"? What's the point? Every normal car has them so it's totally redundant.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yeah, why would MS try and retain clients? They'll just let cities drift off into "roll your own" land and watch their business revenue shrink...
Ken
Don't people in other countries have a right to work, too? Tribalism, faugh.
Not that it doesn't make sense for a city to consider its larger picture... it certainly does. Tax money shipped to the US is gone. If they spend the same money locally, some of it will come back to the city, particularly when you include the ripple effects from that money flowing around the local economy. So the net actual cost can be lower, even if it's higher on paper... and if the outlays are smaller and local, then the city benefits from both effects.
But refusing to pay foreign workers just because their foreign, even when it does make more sense economically, is just tribalism and we should stop it.
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They are germans, keeping in lockstep is part of their culture.
Bavaria doesn't count as Germany?
Because Linus referred to it as Linux when he released his kernel, and when other people added a large number of GNU utilities to that kernel and called it an OS they simply perpetuated the name.
Any thoughts of a greater "conspiracy" is a wasted effort - maybe if RMS had actually focused on writing his own kernel instead of taking a decade to decide on the "proper" kernel his suite of software utilities and another decade to write the kernel then it would be regarded as something more than a set of tools added to Linus's OS.
Ken
Yep, higher cost ...
No, lower cost. The higher cost was only short term. In the long term they saved money. Windows is cheaper in the short run because people already know how to use it, and more importantly, already know how to use MS-Office. So you save on training costs. But that is less true today. Where I live, the schools have all switched to Google Docs, so the kids will enter the workforce with little experience with MS-Office, but plenty of experience with tools that can run on any OS with a browser. So in the future, the break even time for switching will be shorter.
Munich is in the southeast of Germany.
You do realize that having stayed in the Windows camp, they would have one migration more, because they're (12 years ago) migration target Windows XP is unsupported.
You are WAY over simplifying the mystical licensing systems in Windows. It is one of the most confusing things to manage, and yes I know what I am doing.
Second, I never really understand this training with office products. The best training you can give anyone is to teach them to stop using office products becuase the last thing a company needs is a bunch of random content producers. Get your work into a content management system (and NO that is not Sharepoint), and force workers to only create content as it specifiucally relates to their job, and not via word processors and spreadsheets.
It's the intention and effect that outsourcing to other countries usually has. Namely:
Intention -- searching for those who will work for the least, in countries that have more relaxed environmental regulations and to avoid taxes
Effect -- increased localized unemployment, a "race to the bottom" on wages, damage to the environment and government budget crises
If you're outsourcing things because it makes sense -- i.e. not every country can produce their own efficiently -- then that's not a problem. Doing it for the other reasons is what causes vast problems.
Oh and for extra bonus craptasticness -- it's unsustainable in the long run.
Is the +4 Interesting you got because the 'whoosh' sounded peculiar? The post you're replying to is an obvious dramatization of the kinds of trouble folks have with UNIX style filesystems. In other words, your reply is preaching to the choir.
And yes, people do have these problems. I work with Windows admins and while good at Windows, they don't quite grok UNIX-type filesystems and design, referring to the root partition as the 'root drive' or even 'C: drive'.
CAPTCHA: pounding: what Windows admins heads do when working with Linux.
But refusing to pay foreign workers just because their foreign, even when it does make more sense economically, is just tribalism and we should stop it.
So what you are saying, if there is somebody else who can do the job, I should immediately give it to him, instead of even trying to do it myself? If somebody else knows something I do not, I shouldn't learn it?
That's just ridiculous.
Trying to do something on your own is not tribalism. Failing, and still refusing to call an outsider, is.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Whoops it cut out part of my statement because it thought I was trying to insert HTML code. That should read:
If you're outsourcing things because it makes sense -- i.e. not every country can produce their own (insert specific niche agricultural product here) efficiently -- then that's not a problem. Doing it for the other reasons is what causes vast problems.
but I find myself being even more annoyed, at this point, by people calling GNU/Linux Linux... Linux is a kernel. Why do people continue to call GNU/Linux (i.e. the whole system) by the name of the kernel it uses? Would seriously like a person or two to explain what exactly the reasoning behind this phenomenon is, if indeed there is any.
I have two theories. /.
1. It is convenient and only annoy a tiny minority.
2. It is a sinister conspiracy with you as the target of the clandestine organization THEY (affiliated with Illuminati, Scientology, Bert and Ernie) with the single purpose of annoying you on a every time you visit
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
No longer are they striving to put out the best software
I'm sorry, did I miss something? When were they ever trying to put out the best software? "Bottom line" has always been the bottom line with M$
And the annoying phrasing of my last sentence was a sinister plan by my dog to annoy all the grammar nazis out there by distracting me while editing.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
My company is a large MS partner. And we have frequent transitory issues with licensing and the servers that support it (not hardware faults). It's a pain in the ass when outlook says you're not licensed and shuts down (then works fine a few minutes later). Whatever the exact cause, this is one thing you *do not* have to put up with on Linux.
> How hard do you imagine MS software licensing is?
With Linux I don't have to deal with this bullshit at all, ever.
Because the FSF owns the GNU and the associated Trademarks. So in order to actually call it GNU or GNU/Linux the distro developers would be infringing on the GNU trademark.
Furthermore the FSF demands that the copyright all code to committed to a GNU project be signed over to the FSF.
So I can only guess that RMS was trying to hijack Linux when he suggested that Linux be called GNU/Linux because of the FSF's failed attempts to create a kernel. If Linux called his system GNU/Linux the FSF would have had basis to actually try and acquire the copyright.
And lastly, GNU/Linux is incorrect because there's nothing in the GPL that requires GNU be included in the naming of the software, nor is there anything in the GPL that permits GNU to even be used in a product that allows the GNU trademark to actually be used by organizations other than the FSF.
So the only possible, name for the OS is Linux.
Also note there nothing prevents others from using the kernel for some other purpose and calling the OS whatever they want to say Android?
And you still call your TV "Television", your car "Automobile" or "horseless carriage", your ATM "Automated Teller Machine", Fax "Facsimile", Kleenex "Tissue", Xerox "photocopy", etc. right?
People abbreviate things over time. It is efficiency or an optimization in time spent communicating: long words slowly become shorter words; usually a few syllables for convenience's sake.
Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.
What? Really? You think the windows traditional
C:\"Documents and Settings"\USERNAME
is easier and more expressive then /home/USERNAME
Then there is the stupid "My Documents" concept. I once helped a secretary find a document she stored under "My Documents" and she couldn't understand why it wasn't there. She was on a different computer but thought since the abstract thingy "My Documents" was right in front she that it was her documents.
If chef or puppet are not friendly enought you can always invest in a third party like Novell Zenwork and manage your workstation with it. Sure it's defeat the purpuse of always using Open Source tools and not paying for licence but options do exist. Also, Gpo are not really anything special, it's a pretty interface on a couple of reg key that control the some aspect of the workstation UI. Everything it does can be done by puppet on a workstation
Yes, tribalism. If you can get what you done need for $1 per hour, and get it done just as well/quickly/etc., you should do it, and invest the savings in other parts of your enterprise (whatever that may be). Choosing to pay more merely so you can pay the money to your own tribe is tribalism.
We're all humans, and no tribe is inherently more deserving than any other.
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So what you are saying, if there is somebody else who can do the job, I should immediately give it to him, instead of even trying to do it myself?
If he can do it cheaper, or better, or faster, why would you not? If considerations other than who he is drive you to do it yourself, well and good. But if you're keeping it local merely because he's "other", that's tribalism.
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Of course that was then for a XP migration. So they've saved themselves the cost of migrating all over again to Windows8.1u1 as well - in other words, 1 slightly more costly migration costs much less than having to migrate twice over to XP and then Win8 (and possibly then downgrade to win 7 :-)
Don't forget, these guys were early-adopters of commercial Linux, everyone who does that pays more in the early days. If your council did it today, they'd probably find it is cheaper thanks partly to the work the Munich guys did.
They will deeply regret this once a weird error on a critical system pops up in a few years time, and nobody is around to give support.
Yeah, Munich is such a tiny little backwoods place that there's no way they'd ever be able to find someone who knows anything about Linux.
You mean two End-Of-Life (EOL) operating systems that even MICROSOFT won't be supporting anymore unless significant multi tens of million dollar contracts are signed are better than a platform that can be automated to be updated to the latest service patches and allowed to evolve with custom and open source frameworks that taxpayers can then use themselves providing a double return on investment?
Do people really get degrees in IT fields without studying Unix?
Serious question -- I'm a scientist and everybody works with it at some time or other, and a computational physics course using C on Linux is standard fare. At the grad school I went to, there were shared Linux workstations in all the graduate student offices, just as a matter of course, and if you didn't know how to use them you figured it out.
Can you really get a whole degree in computers without touching Unix?
Exactly. Sure, the FIRST migration cost more. But now they would have had to buy new machines and switch to Windows 8 because XP went out of support. With Linux, they have no need to do that. If the PCs still run OK, they can still use PCs from that era until they die because Linux is generally far more efficient than Windows with the same hardware. And they can still put the latest releases of Firefox or Chromium or whatever on those older PCs and only upgrade when they break or when they feel they need to.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Intention -- searching for those who will work for the least, in countries that have more relaxed environmental regulations and to avoid taxes Effect -- increased localized unemployment, a "race to the bottom" on wages, damage to the environment and government budget crises
That's one local, short term effect.
The non-local short term effect is increasing wages in the other country. With increasing wealth comes increasing desire for a clean environment, etc., or do you think that people in other countries are inherently less interested in those things than you are? They aren't, they just don't yet have the means to pay attention to them, because they're focused on survival. As their wealth rises that will change... which if you care about the environment is a Very Good Thing, because it's not like their pollution stays where it is.
Spreading the work around increases the wealth of the human race as a whole. Sure, it may well decrease, at least temporarily, the wealth of your tribe, but from a global perspective that's actually a good thing. And one thing we've learned over the past millennia is that increasing participation in commerce eventually benefits everyone -- a rising tide lifts all boats. In the long run your tribe will be economically better off, too.
But, morally, the best way to approach the issue is to expand your tribe to include the entire human race.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Well, what drive is it on? /, and your CD gets connected at /media/cdrom, your thumbdrive at /media/usb, and so on.
Tell them: in this OS there is one filesystem, and the stuff on your drives is attached to various places on it. So you might have one drive at
Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?
It's not -- it's attached somewhere to the filesystem.
Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Because / means divide, and it's a directory divider.
Seriously, if you can't understand this after fifteen minutes of explanation you shouldn't be paid to fuck with computers.
No, we should value our neighbor more than some remote individual in another country. Besides the ethical and moral considerations, there are practical ones as well. If your neighbor has a job, he will not have to steal from you to survive. there will be networks effects where the area improves as more people have moeny and spend it. look at urban renewal efforts where as people see improvements and have stable jobs they improve their properties and it encourages their neighbors to improve their properties. The reverse happens all too often as well.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
You missed DOS 5, Windows 95, SQL 7, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Office 2007, Windows 7. There have been MANY times in the past when Microsoft put something out that was the best in the world at the time. And sometimes, it took people a while to realize it.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
And yes, people do have these problems. I work with Windows admins and while good at Windows, they don't quite grok UNIX-type filesystems and design, referring to the root partition as the 'root drive' or even 'C: drive'.
How is this possible? It doesn't make any sense, unless the people you're talking about are complete idiots who shouldn't be administering anything, including Windoes.
I guess I could sort of understand this if you were talking about DOS or Windows prior to the past 15 years or so.
But modern Windows actually acts like the various drives are "subdirectories" under "My Computer" in some ways (at least in appearance). And any actual admin would understand the idea of mapping a "network drive," which could often be a random directory on another computer, to a drive letter. And then one could create a shortcut from a specific folder to such an arbitrary location.
If your Windows admin has never had an occasion to connect to a random directory on a networked computer or use a shortcut to get to another root director on a drive... well, I don't know what to say. But if he/she has, the concept of Linux filesystem should just be a simple extension of that.
I'm sure Windows USERS often have trouble understanding the Linux filesystem. But a Windows admin who couldn't figure it out after a few days should be fired.
Spoken like a man who's never used RHEL.
It does seem to me that a local government should have the welfare of the local community in mind. After all, that is really the purpose of government. If the local government can improve the quality of its services (Linux migration) and at the same time, build skills and direct resources to the local community, then it is a win-win situation.
That is the problem with corporations; they are only concerned with profit and not their workers or communities. They will sell their mother into slavery if it improves their bottom line (and their income).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
My laptop is almost ten years old. Still works fine for profit-making activities, although it no longer can play high-end video games or run Windows. I run Ubuntu on it, with OpenOffice and Firefox and gmail.
See, when you said "a given laptop has a five-year useful life" you identified yourself as an edge-case customer. You're not normal. Either you are brainwashed by closed-source memes, or you are a "gamer", or you are part of the 1% of the people using computers who actually need increased computing power with time in order to complete your work.
Government employees doing routine clerical work for a nation that's a thousand years old aren't going to need continual upgrades to do the same job they did last year... unless they run Windows, in which case they have to chase the expensive upgrade devil to remain supported. It's a no-brainer to use an OS that supports old hardware better, because that way you don't need to replace systems until they actually physically fail... which can be anywhere from 2 to 15 years with currently shipping kit.
A good analogy is renting vs buying a house.
Your mortgage payment might be a bit more than your rent, but at least you are making an investment rather than just giving your money away...
In the end you have a house as an asset.
What saved money? They went with Linux despite it costing more than the MS alternative - it was buried in the fourth paragraph of the linked-to article.
Rather than send fewer dollars to the US, they spent more dollars and hired local Munich companies to handle the migration.
Money was saved by spending more on the local economy </ECO101>
To me, this indicates a change in attitude. No longer are they striving to put out the best software, they're churning revs to keep revenue up. It's a sign of desperation and it has been going on for several years, now.
Meh. It's been going on for several decades. 20-ish years ago I was beta-testing Windows 95. Then I bought Windows 95 when it came out. It had some great new features, but it also was seriously broken in many ways. Office 95 was prettier and had some new features, but in other ways it was a bloated piece of garbage.
I knew a number of people who kept using their DOS version of WordPerfect until the early 2000s on their personal computers -- it was stable, it had basically all the features you could want... why change, other than to get something a little prettier?
At least with word processors you might be able to justify the WYSIWYG factor and the graphical elements as an important advance in functionality for people who like to play around with weird fonts and tweak the appearance of documents (usually without any decent sense of design).
But spreadsheets? Once pivot tables were invented in the early 90s, what did subsequent versions of Excel add other than bloat and prettier graphics? Yeah, you got your 3-D charts. Fantastic. Looks snazzy. But was it worth the HUGE increases in system resources for that?
The GUI for Windows 95 and subsequent versions has been useful. But let's be serious about this -- the standard features of the most common business applications reached maturity in the late 80s, and accumulated only a few more important features in the early 90s. Ever since then, it's mostly been about eye candy and arbitrary changes in interfaces, rather than the "best software." Sure, there are lots of advanced features that some people need that have been added, but mostly Microsoft has been about producing bloated stuff with new interfaces for at least 20 years... generally first with a crappy buggy version followed by something that keeps the same basic interface but fixes the problems... then a new interface and repeat the cycle.
Yep, higher cost, but the money stayed in the local economy. IMHO, that's the most important aspect of all, even if it had cost more after 5 years.
Companies like SAP, a giant German company that sells software to thousands of American firms, might worry about where that argument leads....
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
I'm kinda surprised more people haven't brought this up, especially with all the conversations about XP EOL happening right now.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
yeah and if they migrated to MS-XP all those years ago, they'd be now be doing the migration to Windows 7 and related app upgrades (Office, antivirus etc) so its twice the cost and i'd guess they'd also be planning yet future migration to Windows 8.1 (or 9) by now.
Staying with MS is a treadmill of migration and costs which is only to MS's benefit.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Or go the Red Hat or SUSE solution. For RHEL, you buy an rhn subscription and use Satellite, or go free and use CentOS and Spacewalk. On SUSE use SUSE Manager, it will manage Red Hat as well. One could use Spacewalk to manage SUSE as well.
Satellite is reported to cost $10000 but that is a flat fee, not a per client based license. So for Munich with 15000 clients, that is way cheaper than other options including Microsoft. SUSE says that SUSE manager is up to 50% cheaper than Satellite.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The old hardware is a useful metric, as no company or public entity will replace desktops each year, they must survive for several years.
in no place i said that one must buy only old hardware, just that companies have then and can use then longer than in windows.
if you want to buy recent machines, why not?
what hardware is missing linux support today? brand new 3D cards? Nvidia and AMD support then but closed drivers, Intel support then with open drivers ( AMD is in each new hardware iteration is releasing faster the open drivers, with the final objective of any latest distros version already have at least basic support for any hardware released). Those cards also don't show up in office workstation
The only things not supported i remember are "retina" displays, but those aren't also found in office workstations yet.
So in linux you can support BOTH older and new hardware. Top level, brand new hardware might not be perfect in linux... but people that want brand new high end machines right now will probably don't want linux too... is just not their style! :)
Higuita
The office file formats have been stable for several releases.
One of the big changes I appreciated from excel was the expansion of the 65k row limit to now 2^20 allowable rows. That required a file format change. But that happened several releases ago.
Visual Studio generally supports n+1 version round tripping, e.g. VS 2013 will round trip VS 2012 project files and assets in most cases.. so that mixed organizations of VS 2012 and VS 2013 can work together...
The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset. The tool-strip idea was appropriate back when Win32 was created... in the early 1990s. A fast computer then ran at 33mhz, and a high resolution display was 1024x768. Touch computing was a niche.
Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else. Display DPI has changed. Touch computing is pervasive
The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.
Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.
Now. I think we don't need to look very hard at Slashdot to see that, even if you think MS is making unneeded changes for dubious reasons, they're certainly not the only guilty party. How many Slashdot stories have we read of people who are furious about systemd? How many stories about all of the UI changes in Ubuntu?
There are people who claim that these changes are necessary, but there are also a convincing and vocal contingent who claim they are bad change for bad change's sake.
I learned unix and Linux systems more than 20 years ago, so when I see things like systemd or replacing X11, I just shake my head because I am perfectly happy with the existing systems and do not want to re-invest the time to learn different ones.
Microsoft is by no means unique in forcing change to established patterns and systems.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
If he can do it cheaper, or better, or faster, why would you not?
Because I want to learn to do it cheaper/better/faster?
Because I want to compete against the others??
Because I want to have a job which would pay my bills???
You realize that you effectively advocate immediate closure of the US of A, and moving everything to China?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Microsoft makes him an offer he can't refuse and he wakes up with a penguin head in his bed.
A big piece of the increased cost was due to training expense, when migrating from windows to kubuntu all of the users had to be trained. When migrating from W2K to WinXP the users don't need retraining because they already know it. Now my real world experience is most windows users a very superficial knowlege of windows and any applications they don't use daily, so getting everyone trained to a common level of competency doesn't seem like an expense exclusive to a linux conversion.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We're on Win8 at work, when I'm trying to figure out something that used to be easy in WinXP, Windows knowledgebase tells me how to do it in Windows7, and Windows8.1 but that doesn't help in windows 8! I saw that there is a free upgrade to 8.1 but that just plain does not work so it's not just XP thats been EOLed
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You see, that's the beautiful thing about Linux -- if one company doesn't respect the freedom and spirit of the GPL we have options -- with Microsoft we don't. In the best case, other distributions on the desktop. In the worst case, even BSD on servers.
If some sys admin "sold" out to Red Hat and wonder why they don't have the same freedoms, they are the cause of the problem, not Red Hat for trying to take advantage of the situation.
The hardest part is training the support staff if they've been Windows-centric their whole careers. Somehow just reiterating that everything-is-a-file isn't enough, and many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths.
People struggle to understand windows-style paths too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Actually the MBAs take a very long term view of things. At some point, all the outsourced jobs should lift the developing world up into the developed world. It'll mean a much better quality of life for many people, which will create jobs, globally. Ultimately, if jobs become truly frictionless, someone in India should make exactly what someone in the US makes for the same job at the same qualifications. Leading to a better world.
Of course that's VERY long term. Short term, sucks to be outsourced.
For a time people feared all IT work would be outsourced to other countries. It's certainly not happening in my industry (videogame development) to any significant extent. It turns out it's hard to do any sort of creative problem-solving or collaborative type work outsourced. A number of companies I know who've tried it have either given up or scaled way back on that because of quality issues. I'd be interested to hear if others have seen the same thing in other industries.
You'd think that more game companies would be outsourcing cheap programmers from other countries. Likewise, there are fine artists all over the world, right? Couldn't that be outsourced for much cheaper? I've seen/heard-of companies try to outsource game programming and art, and in every example I heard about, the savings in cost and time were largely offset by the disastrous quality of what was produced, forcing the in-house employees to either significantly touch-up or even completely re-do the work from scratch.
The simple fact remains that it's extremely difficult to guarantee high-quality work when you're trying to find cheap labor, and you end up spending an enormous amount of time in a feedback / QA loop, which tends to be worsened by differences in time-zones, so iteration can take days or even weeks. Additionally, there may be communication barriers, with English being a second language for the contract workers, or perhaps even translated by a third-party. Sometimes an interactive face-to-face meeting is the best way to hammer out design or technical challenges, but it's not an option.
Have you noticed how some American companies are now even advertising that their staffed helplines are staffed i
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
When this was still in the decision-phase and the City of Munich solicited offers, Microsoft started to offer big discounts. As the "Linux-option" became more and more credible, the discounts got even bigger.
This, in turn, angered high-level officials because the realized, perhaps for the first time, how much they had overpaid for the last decade.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
You're not at all clever,
And we're all onto you.
BURMA SHAVE
cat
Hmm, not sure why my post was cut off. It previewed correctly... ah well. Here's the conclusion as best I can remember: ...staffed by US workers? Companies are realizing that annoying their customers with bad customer service when they're already frustrated is bad for business as well (i.e. hard-to-understand accents, etc).
Ultimately, outsourcing is subject to the same project management triangle (fast, cheap, good - pick two) as any other endeavor.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yes, China is such a bastion of a clean environment.
Someone on the MS Office team (if I recall correctly) was once asked why Microsoft doesn't release a Word "lite" that stripped out a lot of the "unnecessary features", or "bloat", as you call it. As it turns out, it's very hard to pin down what features should actually be stripped from a "lite" version, because everyone has their own favorite features. Beyond the primary features that nearly everyone uses, the use pattern for the rest of the features tends to be a very long, shallow tail.
You talk about 'advanced features that some people need have been added', but that's one of the reasons for Office's popularity - whatever people need it to do, there's a good chance it can do it. No one uses *all* of those advanced features, but nearly everyone uses *some* of them. That's entirely the point. People mistakenly call the features they don't happen to use "bloat", but your bloat is someone else's "critical feature".
A lot of modern software is like that. What you call bloat I call feature-rich. Go back to 80s or 90s software that was expensive, hard-to-use, and much more limited in capabilities? Once you take off the rose-colored glasses, I suspect you'd discover a whole lot of annoyances and limitations in software of that era that you completely forgot about.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
> Spreading the work around increases the wealth of the human race as a whole
This is true, the economics are pretty straightforward. And it is working very well for the 2nd and somewhat 3rd world. the problem is the disproportionate wealth accumulated in teh first world will 'leak' into the wider pool. Eventually, that pool may rise enough to bring everybody to the standards of the 1st world, but, imho, not for a long time, if ever. This isn't such a good deal for the people in the 1st world who will lose access to the standard of living that they have been enjoying.
To think of it another way, this is similar to having the 1% spread their wealth to everybody in America. Or even just the poorest half. that would, likely, jumpstart the economy , people invest in education and more people have the chance to innovate. In aggregate, everybody is wealthier. But the 1%s will be poorer and won't attain the same levels of wealth accumulation in the foreseeable future.
It is hard to sell people on such an altruistic ideal at their own expense. It is likely what will happen (worldwide, not the 1% analogy) but, imho, standard of life in the first world is going to drop considerably.
- a rising tide lifts all boats.
A rising tide in one location means a ebbing tide in another. There is a finite amount of water.
Not necessarily tribalism, but about supporting the local community in preference to remote communities. Similarly, if you've got a family business, then hire your kids instead of outsourcing to the neighbor's kids.
But most of these countries have a relatively weak citizenry compared to the government or corporate leaders.
Also the outsourcing is not creating sustainable industries in those countries, it is instead merely creating a demand for a worker pool that will come and go as other countries compete to be the cheapest. So you have 1000 workers all answering the phone to say "have you tried turning it off and back on" but that is not fundamentally changing the economy any more than if you dumped the money out from an airplane.
A lot of places have cancelled their outsourcing plans because it just doesn't work for the long run. Much of the time things were driven by MBA trained people who only looked at short term profits and counted bodies but ignored the larger picture. Ie, developers are outsourced but then expenses rise because management costs suddenly soared, security became a concern, quality of the product went down, the local devs who remained left out of frustration, etc. Even for simple call centers there have been problems with outsourcing.
Essentially when you choose the lowest bidder you end up getting what you paid for.
Then you end up with a CEO sitting in his mansion wondering why his home town has turned to crap and is now full of stinky homeless people and gang crime. Now if this CEO were willing to relocate to a third world country and impart his brilliant wisdom in all-hands meetings over there, things would be fairer. But if he wants to live in a first world country with first world quality of life then he needs to pay attention to his first world workers (or she as the case may be).
This is the fundamental problem I think, some of these companies want to keep the shiny building containing only upper level management with all other workers obtained from wherever labor is the cheapest. They never consider that maybe upper management could be outsourced as well.
They're also not always outsourcing to save labor costs. They are sometimes doing this to avoid local laws and regulations (and general purpose morality decisions). It would be a good improvement if US based companies were be required to abide by US laws even in their overseas activities.
Ironically, many more secretaries and admins and basic office grunts understood this sort of stuff before Windows popped on the scene. There were perfectly capable of using IBM mainframes, VAX minicomputers, doing all the work on a local TTY, and managing files through the command line. Why then today are they incapable of learning this stuff? Have humans devolved?
It is horrible, but it is undeniably much better than it was before.
Sure this is. It is a good deal for people in the 3rd wold in the long term, as you yourself admitted, and it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources. Thanks to that the first world quality of life improved incredibly in the last century. You are confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.
The went with Linux to end being a slave to Microsoft.
Roghly speaking I haven't owned a Windows install at all for over 5 years and just one Windows VM in the preceeding 5 years.
I couldn't have been happier with the choice. Goodbye virus, worms. Hello being in control.
Goodbye being force to use your computer only the way Microsoft / Apple wants you to, hello doing it anyway it better suits you.
Of course, to some people that live+work inside a little box, Linux can be dangerous !
ROFL quote from TFA:
“Steve Ballmer tried to convince the mayor that it would be a bad decision to switch to open source, because it’s not something an administration can rely on. ...And it just got worse for Microsoft’s boss. “The mayor was preparing for a meeting with Steve Ballmer, and because English is not his native language, he asked his interpreter: ‘What shall I say if I don’t have the right words?’ And the interpreter replied: ‘Stay calm, think and say: What else can you offer?’
Later on during the meeting, the mayor was quickly at the point where he had nothing to say to Ballmer, except for ‘What else can you offer?’ several times.
Years later, he heard that Ballmer was deeply impressed by how hard he was in negotiations!"
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
In the 1960's Digital Equipment had a cross-platform command line file manager called PIP, Peripheral Interchange Program. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program
On all their various operating systems, it was a uniform means to copy, delete, rename, print, list, etc. files.
PIP used slash to mark its command modifiers -- switches. Let the details of DEC's file naming schemes rest in peace. Please do not disturb them less they rise to haunt you as they do me even now.
When Gary Kildall created CP/M, he made a faithfull reproduction of DEC's PIP, with slashes. Remember, CP/M started off using 5.25 inch floppies, and a file system with no sub-directories. My wonderful Kaypro10 had a vast 10 megabyte hard drive that was subdivided as two 5 Megabyte drives, because CP/M coulldn't cope with that much space. CP/M is also to blame for the A/B floppy drives, and the magical vast, fast C/D hard drives, and the colon. Maybe not the colon -- DEC could have done that.
When Seattle Computer Products wrote a 16 bit version of CP/M, which MS bought to make MS/DOS, they included PIP. And the original MS programmers spent a lot of time using DEC systems while developing MS-BASIC.
So that might explain why MS did not use slash in file names. Why they chose backslash instead, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
--
Did you really read this far down the drunken misrememberings of an old programmer?
Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on this new technology?
Amazon has a provisional patent for this in the pipeline I hear.
And Oracle has several of the copyrights.
--
How many copyrights could a copywriter write if a copywriter could write rites?
Yes that's true, but I agree with kenh when (s)he stated that Linux-based OS's are normally much easier to troubleshoot, and to me that's more important that worrying about the age of the hardware. And I say this as someone who used to primarily admin Windows systems.
I don't follow these lines at all:
> it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources.
> confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.
That said, I think you misunderstand me. Lets make up a scale. say the average standard of living around the globe is 100. Basically everybody living in the US (w/ a few exceptions) already enjoys a standard of living far above the mean, say 150. Now, as trade becomes global and we can chose talent from a much wider pool, the flood gates are open and much of the wealth of the 1st spreads to the rest of the world, the world as a whole (should) benefit. More innovators, etc. But we end up all balancing out at 125. overall, a great deal for the world. A bitter pill for the 1st world.
Those european communists are at it again!
"Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race." -Albert Einstein
It's not like an RHEL system will magically stop working because the licensing is messed up. Updates from RHEL servers will be unavailable for the time being and that's it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Agree completely with your comment that the decision wasn't based on cost - because they were deciding based on a study. The projections in that study indicated staying with Microsoft would be cheaper. But also important to note that that's not how it played out in the end - in addition to the expected benefits of re-investing in the local economy and establishing autonomous control, they also saved money.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset.
A "reset"? I was doing just fine with the old menus. I have no problem with a "reset" if that's what you want. But I'm more efficient when I use the UI I'm used to. So at least, give me the option of keeping the old UI. You can even make the new UI the default. Just leave me a way to use the one I'm used to.
The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.
I have yet to meet one person who prefers the ribbon over the old menu system. Maybe they exist, but I haven't met them yet. If you want to talk about UIs that need to change, I present: Visio. Purchased by Microsoft from Visio and, to this date, the UI is quirky and out of step with the other Office products. And that's putting it kindly.
Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else
I'm sorry -- is this a plus or a minus, or just a clear indication that Microsoft's Office development team has been badly in need of a competent UI designer for over 20 years?
Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.
Maybe for you. I edit my documents on a wide screen laptop. I'll grant you that being able to share documents is a big deal, but you will never convince me that being able to edit documents on your phone is a major leap forward in anything but frustration and eyestrain.
I don't follow these lines at all: > it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources. > confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.
That said, I think you misunderstand me. Lets make up a scale. say the average standard of living around the globe is 100. Basically everybody living in the US (w/ a few exceptions) already enjoys a standard of living far above the mean, say 150. Now, as trade becomes global and we can chose talent from a much wider pool, the flood gates are open and much of the wealth of the 1st spreads to the rest of the world, the world as a whole (should) benefit. More innovators, etc. But we end up all balancing out at 125. overall, a great deal for the world. A bitter pill for the 1st world.
However, the 125 is really just an inflated 100, and the 1st worlds will just figure out a way to raise the 150 to 200 at the same time.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)