Munich's IT Lead: 'No Compelling Reason' To Switch Back To Windows From Linux (techrepublic.com)

"The man who runs Munich's central IT says there is no practical reason for the city to write off millions of euros and years of work to ditch its Linux-based OS for Windows," reports TechRepublic. Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino summarizes a German-language article: Karl-Heinz Schneider, lead of Munich's local system house company IT@M, goes on to claim, "We do not see pressing technical reasons to switch to MS and MS Office... The council [in their recent plans] didn't even follow the analysts' suggestion to stick with using LibreOffice." Furthermore, Schneider stated that "System failures that angered citizens in recent years never were related to the LiMux project, but due to new bureaucratic procedures..." and apparently decisions by unqualified personnel at the administrative level, as Munich's administration itself states.

Comments

Re:millions of euros and years of work

[dbIII]

The cost of buying computers over the last decade adds up to a bit no matter what you put on them.

Re:LibreOffice

[drinkypoo]

Business people live and breathe Excel. They know what they are doing.

I've seen plenty of evidence that they don't.

Re:Translation

[Ol Olsoc]

Usually the people who complain that software B is hard to use have been using software A for 10 years and B is just different enough to throw them off constantly.

Exactly. I made the transition from Microsoft's suite to AO and LO almost seamlessly. I had to look up some things in their spreadsheet, but that might have taken up 15 minutes. since then. On the other hand, fixing documents from Windows to OSX was a regular part of operation, I probably spent months overall.