London Council Dumping Windows For Chromebooks To Save £400,000 193
girlmad writes: "Google has scored a major win on the back of Microsoft's Windows XP support cut-off. The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham has begun moving all its employees over to Samsung Chromebooks and Chromeboxes ahead of the 8 April deadline. The council was previously running 3,500 Windows XP desktops and 800 XP laptops, and is currently in the process of retiring these in favour of around 2,000 Chromebooks and 300 Chromeboxes. It estimates the savings at around £400,000 compared to upgrading to newer Windows machines — no small change."
Re:All that is left (Score:5, Interesting)
is for the diva to sing the operatic conclusion and for cats and dogs to get along.
Microsoft is so doomed. Who really needs them? Not most people.
Have you seen the latest Samsung tablets? Holy cow the better than Hi-def resolution, vivid colors, awesome performance, none of them running Windows, all of them running Android. I saw them recently and my first reaction was: Microsoft is so doomed.
Yeah, all except for that pesky near 90% desktop market share, and the millions of applications people rely on that use a Windows operating system to do their work. The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms, but make no mistake, Windows is still very firmly entrenched on the desktop. And regular old computers where people still need to get work done on a day to day basis is still a lucrative market, if not as sexy as phones and tablets. The fact that it makes Slashdot headlines when a company or government branch moves away from Windows tells you that it's not exactly happening all over the place either.
Not trying to sound like a shill here, but let's try to stay realistic. MS is going nowhere for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, they keep pissing off their desktop customers with garbage like Windows 8.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This will not end well (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally in our organization we like to save money but we also view buying a laptop as a very low cost expense. When an employee costs $100-$200k to employ (overhead, office space, janitorial, taxes, healthcare etc) a $1,000 system every 2 years or so is a tiny drop in the bucket.
At $150k / 40 hour weeks * 48 weeks = $79 per hour.
At that rate it only takes 10 hours of time savings before the computer (or $1,000 software) is "free". 10 hours sounds like a lot but if your employee has to wait 2 minutes a day for 2 years for a slow process you're looking at over $1,000 in wasted time. 2 minutes a day is a very very low bar for achievement.
Instead of trumpeting how much they saved on licensing fees, I would ask how much time they are saving--or are they? Is this just the IT department triumphantly cutting their budget or HR picking up the expense of extra employees to do the same work. That's the headline I would be interested in. If this saved them having 2 employees then they would save 400,000 pounds. If it meant they needed 3 more employees then they not only replaced the upgrade fees but actually increased their net budget.
I would suspect that WindowsRT like you say would probably be the easiest transition. I would argue that more than 2 minutes per day would be lost to Linux "hiccups" and confusion.
Chromebooks for Business .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why Half of Our Company is Using Chromebooks [bettercloud.com]
Chromebooks capture 20% of commercial notebooks [pcworld.com]
Re:The really amazing thing... (Score:4, Interesting)
The really amazing thing is that one small Borough of London apparently employs over 2300 admin workers.
No wonder our taxes are so high.
Your taxes are high because the Square Mile in London pays no (as in Zero) taxes.
There's your problem.
Go after the giant gaping hole in your budget, not the smaller one that is admin.
Why from one pit of snakes to another? (Score:4, Interesting)
Moving from MSFT is a great move but jumping into Google's camp is a bad move. It's trading one set of evils/problems with another. A few years ago I would have said great move but Google lately has started to become a more smiling version of Apple and Microsoft and frankly is pushing their commercial interests above that of open computing. London Council can be proud of saving money but in a few years I think we'll be hearing another headline that they're switching to something else.