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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

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Relevant well-known case: when Munich switched to Linux and then switched back to Windows 10

https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/26/linux-pioneer-munich-swi...

Which is, of course, the canonical example of why all governments should do it.

The project didn't fail, it was on pace to succeed, which made Microsoft swoop in and basically bribe them to switch back.

The lesson being, switch to Linux. Either you'll switch and save money, or Microsoft will bribe you not to and you'll save money.

The linked headline from the OPs post about the switch:

> Linux in Munich: 'No compelling technical reason to return to Windows,' says city's IT chief

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp...

The reason was probably a shift in IT management who wanted to keep things "simple" with some vague thing about keeping one platform since they had kept previous windows machines around which were apparently "absolutely needed". It takes heart in the management to keep Linux around, which isn't always a reliable thing. Even when there was no "technical" need to use the more expensive Windows option.

But this sounds 100% like a Microsoft sales/marketing job, which they are amazing at. They've really perfected selling to big firms, which you could see with the growth of Azure. Which I witnessed when they unleashed their sales machine on startups to get them to use it, and it was quite interesting to see in action.

It was absolutely a political decision. Microsoft even moved their offices there from slightly outside of Munich to inside of Munich.

First time I hear this. So they didn't move offices from the far away Berlin to Munich, they just moved them from a small nearby suburb into the downtown of Munich? How was that such an important decision?

> How was that such an important decision?

Taxes. Politicians still think Microsoft pays taxes. Though 60M [1] per year in taxes while paying much more for their software is technically a retarded thing to do deal-wise.

[1] https://www.northdata.de/Microsoft+Deutschland+GmbH,+München...

That only makes sense if the total bribe outweighs the investment in building the credible alternative.

The bribe ends up in your pocket, the credible alternative only serves the general public.

The bribe here is not to people but to the government. If the tax effect for the city outweighs licensing costs it makes sense for the city to switch. The city where their office used to be is the one suffering under the decision.

> That only makes sense if the total bribe outweighs the investment in building the credible alternative.

It only makes sense to take the bribe in that case. It always makes sense to prepare for the switch, because if they won't bribe you enough to stop then you can always actually do the switch, which is still better than the status quo.

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsoft makes the money and has its monopoly.

On the OS not being critical, I think that might be the case in 10 years, but large companies still have loads of internal desktop applications that haven’t moved to the web yet.

But agree with your point on Office, there are many large organisations which are literally running on Excel, and which IT budget would have to grow 10 times if they were to replace all these excel based processes.

And I must say that I haven’t seen any good alternative to Excel for a non programmer to set up a custom set of calculations, or deal with data. I am trying to get more people to learn SQL in my company, which shouldn’t be too difficult. But you are not going to write a company valuation model in SQL. And I had poor results at getting non programmers to pick up coding (I offered 1 week external in class courses, lots of people volunteered but 80% did not really do anything with it).

I wonder what a landscape would look like where the OS isn't critical but everyone's still on Excel.

Wine suddenly gets really really good, maybe?

It's difficult to work without ms office because the government uses it. That's why ms vigorously opposes all those "X Government Switches To Linux!" efforts, they know where the money come from.

Google Sheets has a History of your edits and if that's utilized well can make it well superior to MS.

I think using gsuite software would defeat the point of switching desktop operating system to avoid being dependant on a single company.

It's a quite common way to negotiate lower licenses fees.

Bingo. I've seen this strategy time and time again.

It's part of the reason Microsoft is playing to their strength with Office 365, it's almost impossible to replace at this point.

That's what I thought. Flagged.

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