Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out Microsoft
nordjyske.dk
nordjyske.dk
Now I'm somewhat shocked that a government is still stuck on Microsoft products.
All of this will be forgotten when the orange monkey is gone.
So if it has to happen it has to happen yesterday.
China did it because it is capable. I am not yet convinced that Europe will not bungle it again. In recent times talking 2 minutes about technical issues is too much mental strain for a lot of people that need to make decisions.
You don't have to be a geek to understand these issues, just some basic critical thinking skills would suffice. There is also risk here, but it should be easy to mitigate that. Also, people need training to use different applications.
they save money in the process, switching to a non-american based cloud provider.
Both works pretty well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
It was about many things.
It's probably a legit complaint, but still potentially the fault of Microsoft. People learn how to use Excel, and the free alternative suites don't have all the same functionality (or if they do, it's not the same UI so you have to re-learn it).
And with as prolific as Office is, you're going to have to open office documents. If that doesn't work cleanly, that's a big issue.
I haven't looked into if whatever incompatibilities are a result of Microsoft pressure or technical shenanigans, or it just being a natural consequence of the free suites being less well funded in their development efforts.
I don't think it's impossible to run an enterprise with FOSS - but it is not easy.
Here is an interview with Christian Ude in which he mentiones that Bill Gates was unable to understand how reying on Microsoft products would make a city "dependent":
> Funnily enough, during the conversation, he kept making new financial offers, including what Microsoft would add to the price, for the school department, for example. They continually became cheaper by a million, another million, another million, and later a dozen million. That's how important the symbol of the renegade state capital of Munich, internationally perceived as an IT stronghold, was to Microsoft.
This was Ballmer though, not gates. Maybe Gates had a separate visit.
So it can't be the reason.
Kinda dishonest framing there.
Or at least train them and get them to buy into a different platform.
Then repeat that for the next 30-50 years until the paycheck goes to a funeral and burial plot.
Replacing MS with something else (really, anything else, American or otherwise) doesn't result in anything new or innovative anyways. It's document editing and database management. Your city government was doing it with a Commodore 64 in the 1980s.
It would be like if your manager came in and said, “We are switching away from your expensive jetbrains IDE. You can just use notepad, right?”
Debatable. Even then, why that matters? I would think 90% of the world population never used Excel anyway.
> You can just use notepad, right?
No, you are missing the point. Intentionally.
People use Excel because it is familiar, because it has distribution. They don't (care to) know any alternatives. If they'd never been familiar with Excel they wouldn't ask for it.
Forecasting? Yes. Dynamic formulas? Yes — much better than writing code (you’d have to write a reactive widget in Jupyter).
Most people don’t need to do ML but they need to do complicated formulas and get immediate feedback. Excel is really good at that. Libre office can do 90% of it but Excel has some advanced features that it doesn’t come close to.
How are you even going to ingest the data you want to visualize from the database it's in otherwise? It won't fit on your computer as is. You need something like Tableau to query and inspect it.
edit: Sure, let the finance people have their spreadsheets, but don't let that stuff anywhere near engineering and data science. It's a major anti-pattern.
Every F500 company has accountants, FPNA, auditors, likely even the CFO who are doing their analysis in Excel. They live and breathe it. It is their everything app which they run 40 hours a week. They know Excel, they are the 10x rockstars of their field.
It is a common refrain here that you should absolutely invest in SAAS tools at $/month if it makes your workers more productive. Even if they are not slinging code, these people already have the best tool for their job. Making them all switch to save a few bucks to a less feature complete option is hamstringing yourself.
Could many people switch without issue? Sure, but it is foolhardy to imagine a 100% cut over without enormous pain to the elite staff.
Can confirm that I will take Excel from the cold dead hands of our CFO (and the rest of his dept). Hell even macOS Excel is too much weirdness for them. And being user of both platforms I agree with them.
The rest of the company are very happy though on Google Worksheets, making lists and replying to RFP requests in .xlsx, on their Macbook.
We do a survey every year; 95% of staff is happy with the resources out at their disposition. Including those working on a platform that is not their native platform.
End users are more flexible than we think. Especially non technical ones.
The people who say Open Office is great are the same people who say Linux Desktop is great for non-technical users. They're completely oblivious to the shortcomings. Impossible to get through to them, and they're perpetually clueless why most people will choose things like Gdocs and Microsoft.
My tech illiterate mother got on a lot easier with modern desktop linux than she did with modern desktop windows.
Windows enjoys "ease of use" because of inertia, talk to someone who hasn't used Windows since XP and they'll find KDE a hell of a lot easier than whatever the fuck Windows 11 is doing.
A better direction for Microsoft is to make it free for personal use and charge the businesses.
The Linux Desktop may not be "great" by whatever standard of "great" you come up with, but the state of the Microsoft desktop is slow, inconsistent, frustrating, and tries to upsell you, while also attempting to steal your data.
The only people who had trouble with Ubuntu were IT support employees of a local telecom provider when they needed to configure a network on the laptop.
Same can be said about GNOME.
Yes where what can't be done very well is CAD. All the top notch CAD of any engineering discipline is on Windows. Or Mac maybe.
Second come the games. You don't have Read Dead Redemption or Microsoft Flying Simulator with same fluidity as they are on Windows.