For a mail client?
Regardless, the point I wanted to make was, that Accenture got their payback in terms of an exclusive business venture with Microsoft to "advise" more companies in the private sector to bet exclusively on MS infrastructure.
Then they were sued for 32 Million USD by Herz, for a website project they cashed 32 Million USD in on. For a website project. Worth maybe 20k, heck - I'm generous today, make it 200k. They cached 32 Million for it. And delivered next to nothing.
I mean if your business is all based on selling people on monopoly power (closed format), then being bought out as an 'independant consultants', and then sell or help sell all information on the customer (https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-office-365-banned-from-german-schools/), and then hope not to get sued by your former clients - at which point is it polite to say that you suck?
I mean I'm all for opportunity in capitalism, but this is a little bit much.
Things are not as easy as they look on the surface. I'm not gonna lie, I have a preference for open source software but for a lot of use cases Microsoft has the better products - period. The cost savings estimations that were published are also very misleading IMO. They assumed the same labor cost for both Windows and Linux while they were maintaining their own Linux distro and developing in-house software to facilitate a migration to OpenOffice. However, they also estimated the cost for personell training to be the same for both scenarios where I believe it would be much higher for Windows.
They estimated they saved 10 million Euros with LiMux over the course of 10 years in an infrastructure of a scale of 15,000 desktop PCs. That's not that much if you consider the cost of organizational issues that surely came up along the way that haven't been factored in at all.
Another thing that simply isn't mentioned is that you buy support from Microsoft along with most licences but that has not been quantified in the LiMux reports at all. They did not buy commercial third level support for Ubuntu or OpenOffice and assumed there's no cost savings with Microsoft products here.
They also only considered the cost of hardware upgrades necessary for windows without looking at energy savings as hardware has become a lot more energy efficient during the timeframe that the LiMux project lasted.
Low user acceptance and growing pains will also lower productivity but that is very hard to quantify. In some cases you're saving money by replacing hardware outright.
The point is that something with the scope of LiMux really only gets viable in large scale deployments where labor cost is becoming less of an issue compared to licensing cost, LiMux also committed them to maintaining their customized solutions for an unforseeable time. It makes sense, especially for a private entity, to avoid this scenario. Another thing to consider with private entities is that they tend to get more and more decentralized as they grow, which is another point where a city administration has better chances at success because they can keep a centralized IT department.
Microsoft recently revoked CERN's status as an educational organization and require them to pay full price for licensing now. CERN has announced that they are looking for open source alternatives. They have been blogging about it here: https://home.cern/news/news/computing/migrating-open-source-technologies
I'll cheer them on!
Last edited by supersonicwaffle,