Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says 589
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.'"
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
"Microsoft gave us a 98% discount in exchange for this article."
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lock-in? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lock-in? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Lock-in? (Score:5, Informative)
Choose Format - Font Size
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Developers usually don't use the help, mostly because they developed it or just look at the source ... so no, this is not a obvious bug.
Yes, it really is. It's blindingly obvious to anyone who is going to actually use the software and not just develop it. And if you want to be taken seriously in the office software market, catering to normal users instead of geeks is step #1.
Microsoft spend vast amounts of time and money doing user testing and QA and usability polishing and all that stuff. FOSS projects like LibreOffice apparently don't, or at least not effectively. And that's the difference that makes buying MS Office almost an automatic d
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> Microsoft spend vast amounts of time and money doing user testing and QA and usability polishing
Yet they still managed to subject everyone to Ribbon and Metro and sent a lot of long time users running for the hills.
This idea that "payment translates into quality" is certainly bogus for Microsoft. They haven't had to "sing for their dinner" for a very long time. They can just happily take advantage of entrenched market dominance that may just be older than you are.
If there is in fact a "flagship brand"
Re:Lock-in? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Whether or not the help is installed locally or just refers to an online help is usually an install option, in my experience. I haven't installed libreoffice in a long time because I don't like it, personally, but I think it's probably still an option. Maybe not.
If you don't factor in re-training costs, it's never a fair comparison. Training, however, doesn't take millions or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars and once your workforce is trained, new employees can always ask existing employees how to
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Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
The quality of the product only matters until they achieve lock-in. After that, they don't care if the program even runs.
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Except that Microsoft marketing sucks. Case in point: a few weeks ago, my wife and I wandered into a Microsoft store in a mall (it wasn't crowded, honest), and I looked at the Surface and Surface Pros (I wanted to see if I might want one, and decided not). My wife was looking at them too. She's smart, observant, and tech-savvy. After we left, she didn't know the difference between a Surface and a Surface Pro. Since the two are way different in capability, you'd think Microsoft would put some emphasis
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There's a reason Microsoft Office is the industry standard, and not iWork.
It's called the Microsoft Marketing machinery.
MS typically markets to CEO types and get them to force the organization to use the MS products. They also introduce subtle differences.
Back in 1994 WordPerfect and Quattro Pro was the kind of the Productivity suite. Then MS released Win'95 and in the process convinced Novell to implement their Win'95 version using new APIs in Win'95 (namespaces) then pulled the new APIs at the last moment (only to later release them) setting Novell's Win'95 version back 6
Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?
Only when the bathroom is full.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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Things look a bit better for the Win 8/Server 2012 network stack, but my experience with Windows in high connection rate environments is that it just doesn't compare to some of the *nixes.
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Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Not really (Score:4, Informative)
Github went down? Did not notice that. I checked the status [github.com] 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:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Possibly. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
Depends. Having done both open source and closed source (and currently using both) - the problem with open source solutions is often the death by a thousand cuts. You'll get something to mostly work apart from a little problem playing with something else. Inevitably, any support in the form of google, etc. is a case of "well the other closed system is broken". That's all well and good from an idealistic perspective, but people in the real world need to get shit done. A classic case is DHCP based WPAD
True Costs (Score:3, Insightful)
'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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the language from "across the pond" is hard for some US readers to parse. "Exploitation" meaning "use effectively" ... without knowing more about what this bloke's department(s) are tasked to do, it is hard to call him to task for his choice.
I would not be surprised if Macintoshes were even a better match for his user base.
I cannot seem to find it, but I recently ran across a bizarre claim that the average office worker's time is dominated by outlook (duh) but that Microsoft Word was number two at a
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"virtually ANY change is highly disruptive"... you mean like replacing heirarchical menus with a dog's breakfast ribbon?
Re:True Costs (Score:4, Insightful)
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If I can not use Libre Office or Open Office (or anything else) to edit Word-generated documents and return them without formatting disasters, I cannot use anything else than MS Office products. End of story.
You can only guarantee this with MS Office if you both have the same version of Office and you both have the same printer drivers installed, but MS marketing has been very good at convincing people to ignore this...
Re:True Costs (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re: (Score:3)
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...
Office - and a lot of other GUI apps (not just Microsoft ones) - use the printer driver to do their typesetting, since it already knows about fonts and specifically the way that characters will be spaced when printed out. So why would a vendor spend a lot of effort duplicating those algorithms when it can borrow them? In the same way, printer drivers often borrow raster manipulation functions from the video driver, where they are already essential parts - and can on top of that, leverage the video card's ha
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I have a lot of customers who upgrade their PCs a few at a time ... as they upgrade, they get new versions of Office, and then inevitably call and complain about how the documents are changing or can't be opened by other users. Its not uncommon, and its really annoying.
Re:You can't drown if you're a fish (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, like commercial software is such a bastion of good quality software with no vulnerabilities at all.
Recruiting policy (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That can depend on the security and police clearance. A lot more eyes are needed to track local issues on web 2.0 and social media at a town/city level.
Re:Recruiting policy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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same goes for health
however the common theme is that the way that these organisations work is that there is no structure to pay competent FOSS IT people 50-60k a year to administer the network.
It therefore seems 'cheaper' to pay for Microsoft products and to have a bunch of low grade IT staff who can only cope with Microsoft products on 25-30k a year who end up running the helldesk, which casues more unhappiness.
IT staff are like classic cars. the cheapest classic car will always w
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Not to mention with Open Source there's no such thing as Win XP's end of life, and subsequent shift to the "buy updates for the bugs we already sold you" model.
The FLOSS model monetizes work on the software too. Only difference is that you only pay a FLOSS dev once for their work, instead of multiple times. Imagine if a mechanic adopted the proprietary software model.
Each person who drove the car would have to pay up for all the fixes done. To monetize the work done once multiple times he'd just put a coi
Re:Recruiting policy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No, instead you have the end of support for even LTS releases, and then you're hooped if the upgrade doesn't work.
As opposed to Windows 8 where upgrading isn't even an option?
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How about small enough then? For a while, I maintained Debian 'Woody-Potato' for a 10 person shop.
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Yeah, because Ubuntu is the only company that can support Raring Ringtail. Nobody else could possibly read the source.
...and that costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Recruiting policy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Recruiting policy (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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If you mean 5 years of Ubuntu LTS support isn't long enough, I think you can pay for longer LTS support from Canonical, and if not th
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Imagine if a mechanic adopted the proprietary software model.
Each person who drove the car would have to pay up for all the fixes done.
No they wouldn't, just like each person who uses a computer doesn't have to pay for the operating system on it.
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That would be great if Linux IT professionals existed in any number to make it useful. Can you find one? Or even a few? Yeah, but it's not sustainable. Most engineers with a pedigree required for that kind of work are not going to be in nearly the abundance of those trained in Windows. That's the entire point - it would cost a lot more to headhunt and find those with the specific skills needed for such, when you can throw a Wiffle ball and find a half dozen qualified Windows IT professionals. And whe
Re:Recruiting policy (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Try a place that has a CS department that is not sponsored by Microsoft and you'll find such a thing in close to 100% of CS and IT graduates since about 2005.
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most staff are already familiar with Microsoft products
But has anybody told him that XP is no longer supported?
Where did they put "Network Neighborhood" on this version of Windows????
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Word 2013 does open and save ODT files.
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Word 2013 does open and save ODT files.
And the organization-wide license upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 is how much?
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And the organization-wide license upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 is how much?
At a guess I'd say in the tens of dollars per seat, so if you lost even just 1/2 a days' productivity in the switch from MS Office to Google Docs or Libre Office or iWork you'd probably be in the red. Not to mention if you're using Exchange (and most large orgs are) you'd have to then buy Outlook standalone or alternatively find an email client that integrates well enough with Exchange to replace it or replace your email system.
Selling an alternative purely on a small cost advantage is never going to work w
depends on your application. (Score:2, Interesting)
Centralized user login, and two-factor authentication, you're pretty much going to be stuck with either Red Hat Directory Server, or MS Active Directory server. RHDS is going to run you about $15,000. The same MS AD install will be significantly less. This is only one example. I would say that things like Sharepoint and Exchange are pretty outrageously priced. But if you keep it simple, MS can be fairly cost-effective.
On the other hand - the logistics of managing Windows licenses is pretty insane, comp
Re:depends on your application. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux developer arrogance (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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:Mod parent up (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It could be complexity too.
It is hard when you have many apis and libraries all changing all the time.
I think CentOS/Redhat offer something like this, but not for the average Slashdot geek. I like the idea of an equilivant of the SXS in Windows. You have dynamic loading of apis and .so's and the linker links the right one at run time. Today Linux requires each one to work and will segfault or crash otherwise if you have the wrong .so or dependency.
This will make storage larger but you wouldn't have issues l
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Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.
Man, I'd be happy if we could get a commitment to source-level backwards compatibility; let alone binary compatibility. Some of those library developers are vicious in culling old programs.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Welcome to the real world. And I can guarantee you that I live with compatibility issues both in the kernel and in applications. The problem is not the kernel X function in Y hardware, the problem is you write software for the kernel X and on the next month you having to redo everything again because the kernel X.1 is not compatible wi
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Welcome to the real world.
er huh? I'm not sure what you mean by that. Linux is certainly used in the real world and is the modt performant real-world kernel in existence.
the problem is you write software for the kernel X and on the next month you having to redo everything again because the kernel X.1 is not compatible with the previous one.
Not for userland code. For userland code, the kernel has a very stable ABI, osmething I believe there's a good Linus rant on. Some of the library developers are terrible
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I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers.
The reality is most people do not even know about that ideology and ultimately the attempts to sell the idea are on the basis of it being cheap: gratis, not libre.
I know there is this whole "locked in" deal but who really feels that way? I haven't had any problems working across multiple operating systems and devices. The vast majority of the web is obviously platform agnostic, pictures, movies and music are all easily moved back and forth across platforms and even sending documents is no problem. Sending a
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Got a link for that? Linux supports oodles of ridiculously obscure hardware, and support is rarely removed. Yes, they dropped 386 (not 32-bit x86 ... literal Intel 80386 as opposed to 80486) support some months ago; that was a special case because the weirdness of that architecture was permeating the kernel ... but a standard floppy disk drive? I can't imagine they'd be dropping support for that. That support most likely lives in some driver file somewhere and takes approximately zero developer time to
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This isn't arrogance. It's acknowledging that things that belong in the kernel should be in the kernel. In the case of Linux, it's drivers. The only thing that binary drivers get you are hard to debug crashes, vendor dependence, and driver interfaces that must now be maintained ad infinitum. It won't save you from anything in the long run.
Meanwhile, on the technician frontlines (Score:3)
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Only box I ever had with a rooted was a linux box. Some a-hole turned into a spam server.
Sure... (Score:2)
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Not to mention the software and licensing fee hikes that small and medium sized businesses have endures so Microsoft can sell heavily discounted licenses to large organizations to bring that magic TCO down.
"De-risk ongoing cost" (Score:5, Funny)
I want this person arrested for aggravated assault on the English language, immediately.
"It depends" (Score:3)
Google and facebook changing to microsoft (Score:3)
In terms of economics, I'd prefer to trust dollars not mouths. All of the major players in ICT in the last 15 years have a base platform of linux, Google, Facebook etc. They didn't use linux because its more expensive, they did it because it's cheaper. The longer that others stay with high cost platforms the longer their competitive margin remains. ;-)
IT staff cost pretty much the same regardless of the base platform unless you're doing something really esoteric, if you use centos or debian and pay for support not licences where you have a choice you have a chance of making savings. One of the problems with MS is that through a series of low risk choices you get herded into a higher cost solution. Think of the way that wild animal are herded down a funnel with weak barriers until the final half mile which turns into a killing field. Only a few animals make the correct decision of breaking away, the other like this goose try to justify a costly platform as cost effective. ps Mr Creese owns a Windows phone too. He thinks its great.
Re:Mathematics (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah AD with 25 inherited GPOs and legacy IE crap was more expensive than desktop apps just to give these horrible sites to run. I am not talking about IE 6 era sites even.
Complexity is a killer.
However without a stable ABI and API I can not say Linux is better either. Drivers break way too much as a result of the extreme ideology of forcing opensource and killing blobs. This makes NVidia only support later kernels or ignore older hardare and screw users.
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It really depends on the software. Windows itself, negligible.
Yeah, provided you are buying PCs with it installed OEM, and you time your migration to the hardware refresh cycle its not even something to think about.
Office, not much more.
See... I find Office VLAs stupidly expensive for what it is: Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Outlook; Software Assurance is bonkers on top of that, and I hate dealing with VARs instead of directly with MS (or just doing it via the bloody website) on top of that. And now Office 365...
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Re:not about cost in my oppinion (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Not counting the pointless hours I've spent trying to find ANYTHING in Visual Studio, and that is even IF it can do what I need done. It is always faster to look it up on the 'net than use Microsoft's useless "help".
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How the above post could possibly be modded up for any metric is beyond me.
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Tyranny? Try iOS or Android. They constantly track everything I do. It all gets reported back to Google. There's a lot more control with a Windows box than there is in Android. Hell, you can't even use the Android command line to control the DNS settings for 3g and 4g. I have to use an app, and it has to constantly redo the DNS settings. No, Windows isn't the tyranny.
I'm sure if I were a lover of the command line, I could be happy with Linux. However, I think the command line is a royal pain in the as
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Really... I don't ever recall being able to open ANY MS word document in LO or OO correctly, when the document contained absolutely any kind of special formatting and was more than just simple text. Sure, it will open just fine in the editor, but the formatting, especially for any embedded content such as images, will always be fucked up.
Re: Windows Linux for small business (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You mean, you've learned one workflow and you are dissapointed when a separate one works differently.
Not at all strange, just that it's not the same.
I have similar problems going from libreoffice calc to excel since I know libreoffice calc better.
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What has Slashdot become? Home of the Linux weenies.
Are you new here? Slashdot has *always* been the home of us Linux weenies. It was a good place to argue the relative merits of Widows and Linux back in the 90s.
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Windows+LibreOffice is a great combo. My question in this case would be: is there anything that comes close to the functionality of Outlook + Exchange, either as a compl
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Users are not the problem. We have plenty of switch stories where users learn quickly.
Right, but users will adapt when there is a reason to do so. Look at how users adapted to the smartphone concept as we now know it when the iPhone was released, because it was a compelling and disruptive concept, people moved from the existing smartphone concepts to Android/iOS devices because they were significantly more appealing to the end user and provided a better user experience. The desktop Linux distros and free office suites suffer from a problem of not being disruptive in their respective markets
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I'm not clear here, does Linux use some different keyboard and file system paradigm than Windows?