My gut says this is related to forced updates and unwanted interface changes in current Microsoft products. It's been super annoying where I work, and staff are pretty upset.
I suspect they will discover over time that the fully loaded costs of switching are higher than the costs of the licenses, unless this is just a way of trying to leverage MS into giving them academic licenses again.
I suspect the switching costs will be higher in the short term for sure, but this also seems to be a strategic move.
Given that figure, do you really think that one-time project implementation and switching costs amortized over the next X years + ongoing support would really come to more than 10x? How do you make such a strong claim that easily, any prior examples?
Not saying you're obviously wrong or that CERN is obviously right, but this seems to be a much harder call (and intuitively feels right in fact), given the number.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/lower_saxony_to_dum...
Edit: here [1] is a good article (unfortunately in German) about the reasons.
[1]: https://www.golem.de/news/limux-die-tragische-geschichte-ein...
Given this, some years ago, the mayor changed, Accenture did a 'cost' study and MS moved its german HQ to the city.
Can't speak for large organizations but some of the more well functioning places I have worked on has been running without much Microsoft services.
Also for many of us sysadmins in many cases we would say we would possibly save more from not having to deal with the hassle that is Windows than from just the licenses.
I mean: having to run and patch Apache httpd or other standard technologies on Windows is such a major hassle compared to Ubuntu or or any other mainstream commercial distro.
You can of course just use IIS, but then you have to deal with the hassle that is IIS.
This is a bit tongue in cheek, but the idea that Windows is somehow easier for everything is a bit unnuanced I think.
Officialy IT don't support Linux. Unofficially they'll be happy to make sure everything works.
We threw out MS Office many moons ago anyway, and management switched first and with genuine enthusiasm so it was no problem to get the rest of the company on board ;-)
And this is not the first place: Already in 2009 - 2012 I worked for two places like that; well one of them went further and almost completely banned Windows because the IT manager couldn't stand it. The other place just had a policy to let people choose, -and a dev team that would encourage people to pick Macs.
From 2015 I've been free to choose my own OS again.
I guess you are right.
Still it hives me hope that things are changing for the better :-)
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-mum-cerns-planned-mi...
In a quest for money they didn't need and likely were not gonna get much of anyways, by removing perks MS currently offered academic institutions, they've risked teh creation of a much greater threat that can undermine their entire business. CERN is an organization which could truly help create a set of alternative tools to MS products.
Talk about killing the golden goose.