US DoD signs $617 million Windows 8 licensing deal | Hacker News Reader

US DoD signs $617 million Windows 8 licensing deal

microsoft.com

32 points6thSigma48 comments

The title is very wrong and the HN comments so far miss the point that windows is a tiny portion of that deal. I don't know the details, but judging by the products involved, I would say no more than 5-10%. Exchange, Sharepoint, all of Office client and server suites, SQL maybe some private cloud, virtualization, monitoring software, dedicated support, maybe some custom DoD regulatory stuff for records management and whatnot, that's what they're paying for.

I do know that the Army was making extensive use of Sharepoint on the fields in Irak for example.

Also this wasn't a deal with microsoft it was a deal with Insight Enterprises so expect a large portion of that deal to go towards consulting

In reality this isn't that much money. When you consider that the entirity of the DoD runs on Exchange. They are heavy users of sharepoint and in addition to all the Desktops the DoD uses Windows on most of their deployed systems you quickly get to a staggering number of desktops and systems. Then we can start on office by then your at maybe half the actual cost. If you look this was sold to a reseller and I would venture a guess that a good chunk is for actual deployments integrating CaC cards and working with Network operators.

While I would fully support the DoD taking the plung and switching over to Linux for desktops the truth is I don't think there is a Linux vendor out there (Including Red Hat and Oracle ) that has the support infrastructure to deal with the amount of support the DoD will require. It would make more sense to get the DoD migrated to a standards based deployment that was inter-operable between divisions and vendors. Then you would see Linux support shops start to take away friendly divisions and slowly get market share. Without that your never going to see anything but a Microsoft monopoly.

Also if i recall correctly with Windows it was much easier to make OS images (modifying straight from the master gold images), while RedHat and OpenSUSE merely came with a long list of configurations to perform on the PC in meeting the requirements in DoD 8500-2. Granted full deployment would probably change this, however to be used software gets checked out for 'networthiness', and unfortunately there isn't a lot of COTS software for linux. Switching from anything but Windows would be overly expensive - just isn't worth it as long as Windows maintains a good level of backward compatibility (unlike Apple).

My understanding of Windows (which I admittedly have not used day-to-day for the past two years) is that most businesses have typically upgraded on "off-years" (or to make an analogy to Intel's tick-tock yearly release schedule, let's call them "tock" years)

If I understand correctly, the upgrade path looks something like NT4 => XP => Windows 7, skipping Windows 2000 and Windows Vista.

I've not heard of a large customer like this adopting such an experimental release. It certainly seems strange to me, especially considering Windows 8's tepid reception in the marketplace.

Anyone understand the reasoning for adopting this release instead of holding out for the next one, where (hopefully) all the egregious mistakes they've made redesigning the UI will have some sort of acceptable resolution?

The DoD was heavy users of every version of windows thats been released. For a while there was a large number of users and divisions that stuck with XP, but for the most part they just get the newest thing out there. The DoD doesn't operate like a giant corporation they are more like thousands of corporations that have a weird and convoluted relationship to each other.

There's probably quite a bit of infrastructure still on XP though, which could help explain a move to Win8

I don't understand how this release is experimental. W8 works just fine in regular desktop mode, and has much better UX than W7 in several areas. The addition of Metro is just an optional new thing that you do not have to embrace.

My experience with W8 has been like a ping pong match between the two interfaces. If there's a way to disable metro completely, I'd be really happy to hear it.

How is that? In my experience, the only ways to wind up back in Metro after entering Desktop is the Windows key on your keyboard, and Alt+Tab if you have a Metro app running.

Start menu?

Interesting, Ubuntu could help if they wanted to save money, but unfortunately Ubuntu has not gone through the hoops of getting official rubber stamp certifications that say Redhat's RHEL has http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industry/government/certific...

There a good amount of money to be made selling software to the government. They are easily deceived and manipulated to over pay for support as well.

You just have to have someone full time who is trained in navigating the red tape and the network of connections.

Ubuntu ( and Debian ) are approved for use. They just might require a specific setup and might require verification they are secure, while RHEL can be used out of the box.

Do you have more info on this?

So far we found it is easier to just use RHEL for everything. Up until just recently only RHEL 5 (but now also RHEL 6) since it has full FIPS140-2 and EAL4 certifications.

DISA has their list of approved Operating Systems. You can request they approve your configuration if its not already on the list and they will run Retina scans and other checks on it to verify it is secure and then you can use it. Some products like RHEL are pre-vetted so you can just say I am using RHEL and check off that box on the form you must submit to your CTO every now and then. At least that's the way it was where I worked.

I would use more nouns to describe everything and even give you a link to the site, but I think its CaC secured and I left the DoD a few years ago because of these very kinds of issues so I no longer have all this memorized.

And this, after Biden said that he wants to cut $20B from the DoD spending... Really wouldn't be cheaper with something else? Maybe I'm missing something, but a Windows OS by itself takes probably couple to dozen GB, and if this is installed on a tablet device, or even on SSD laptop - this takes significant amount of space (probably to solve SxS issues (dll side-by side versions) which also grows quite big with newer updates).

And then you would have to instruct your personnel to learn two interfaces - Metro, or who knows how it's called, and the old one.

And for that all monitors better be touch-capable, otherwise - what's the point of Windows 8?

I simply don't get it... Me & My wife are both using OSX, and we are happy, and while I understand that this is probably more expensive (or maybe... not) - there is completely free OS alternatives - not one, but at least couple decent.

If a big portion of the internet is built behind free OS, I don't see why DoD can't go with that option too.

Perhaps running their existing applications is a consideration? Or retraining costs? There are plenty of reasons that the total cost of ownership might be lower with Windows.

Agreed, retraining and existing software costs probably make this transition not as overall expensive as it sounds. Now that being said, it would be nice to know that part of the ongoing cost-cutting would be switching specific groups to open source over time so that retraining and existing software becomes a non-issue

Switching at the level of groups sounds like a terrible idea. Suddenly nobody is using the same software. You think an MS Office-only environment is bad? Try an environment with MS Office, Open Office, Star Office, and Google Docs all used as SOP in different parts of the company.

This is the reason for OS lock in the DOD. Billions upon billions of custom MS software exist in the DOD ecosystem. Cost of migration would be prohibitive.

Second issue would be forest management. I am not sure which free or paid nonMS solution would replace the AD/exchange integration and the many other tools required to run a worldwide domain/forest with 2.5+ million machines.

I think the big advantage Windows has in large organizations is that it is secure and it supports Exchange and Active Directory. So, it might be prohibitively more expensive to switch the infrastructure. Plus, most people are familiar with Windows and Windows 8 really is not that much different.

You would think these folks could write their own OS for that kind of money.

Do you have an idea of how much an IT project costs a Government? The firearm registry in Canada, a country much smaller than the US and with a lot less firearms, costs 66M a year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry

I don't see where the big deal is. MS is an American company that employs a lot of people. That money will come back to the government in taxes and spending someday.

That sounds incredibly expensive. I think these companies just price software that way because they don't get a lot of contracts through out the year, if they make only custom software for governments, and they need to make every license very expensive to survive. Then the government pays up, because what the hell - it's not really their money.

So I don't think the prices these companies are asking from governments is in any way related to development time of the software, or even with maintenance time. I think it's mostly based on how much the government is willing to pay.

And I disagree with your last remark, too. By that logic the government can just spend it on anything and as much as they want. They need to be efficient with the money, to be able to make or sustain multiple projects at once. Otherwise they'll have to raise taxes, fire people from other programs, or they wouldn't start new needed projects.

The major problem with Government contracts, and often part of the reason the costs seem insane, is that these are about as established/regimented and non-technical an environment as you can imagine.

Small companies founded+run by agile hackers struggle to navigate their way to contracts under those circumstances. Or at least that's what I've seen from reading about efforts to encourage it in the UK.

In my last remark I am not entirely right but you get the idea. Microsoft employs almost 100 000 individuals and most of them are US taxpayers. If you give them a big contract, it's good for the company, good for jobs in the US and it stimulates the economy in some way. Of course that money doesn't come back automatically the next day. But consider an alternative. Let's say that they get a contract with Samsung instead, the biggest korean company. Let's assume we had the means to follow the flow of money, how much of that money that goes to Korea will return to the US? One can start thinking about this for a long time. It's easier to assume that money spent on Microsoft = jobs and salaries and other things = taxes for govt.

Or hell: pay a team of 6,170 developers $100,000 for a year to make all their apps run beautifully under WINE and/or port the source to Linux outright.

I think its a good idea, except there is some ass-backwards rules to stop this; OMB Circular A-130. The Senate also added to the NDAA 2013 to ensure a "less expensive" commercial software is used.

"The bill indicates that Accumulo may violate OMB Circular A-130, a government policy that bars agencies from building software if it’s less expensive to use commercial software that’s already available. And according to one congressional staffer who worked on the bill, this is indeed the case. He asked that his name not be used in this story, as he’s not authorized to speak with the press." http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/nsa-accumulo-go...

Ah, why am I still surprised... When you can't compete on technical merit, legislate away the competition!

Exactly. It's not they couldn't make requirements unable to be fulfilled by commercial software. It's that Senators and Congressman start getting complaints from the lobbyists representing the competition, and get legislation passed to make it go away.

It is rare that an entity can't write requirements in such a way that no "Commercial Software" full fills them. However in most cases it is cheaper to use COTS software for almost everything. There are very few places in the DoD that have the core competency of writing software. Even in corporate environments how many places write their own software? Most bring in vendors for everything.

Was the DoD primarily using Windows XP up to this point? It would make sense for them to move to 8 if that was the case, given the longer support lifetime.

Windows 7 for most, XP for some groups and specific applications.

Windows 7 is the most common. Some XP, but few Vista ones.

Dear DoD, if you are missing the Start Button, please consider installing Classic Shell - http://classicshell.sourceforge.net :)

Iirc, Windows 8 has a lot of optimization/improvements going on behind the Metro UI so it's a sound investment to keep their systems future-proof. Everyone's bitching about Metro UI but I'd think for a deal that big they could probably get Microsoft to fork over a non-Metro version if needed. Plus from my friends that work in the DoD they're heavily Windows-based (Windows Server/IIS/ASP/.NET) so it makes sense to continue that instead of retraining for a *nix based system.

When this happened in Egypt is spawned protests: http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/activists-protest-micro... while I would support an all linux DoD, I wish even more that one day I might be passionate enough to do something more about it.

And the city of Munich, which is small compared to DoD users saved $17Mill by switching all their users over to Linux.

The city of Munich and DoD have so little in common that I do not understand how you could possibly think this was relevant.

The classified systems will still use Linux, luckily.

Yeah, would have been fun to see NSA to operate under Windows. ;-)

Um, you might want to check out that National Geographic video on the NSA... You'll see a few Linux screenshots, but most of the screens are Windows. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quq67h8j_OY

Now as to their backend systems, who knows.

You think that all classified work is done with linux? As a 10+ year debian user I wish that was the case.

Is the majority of the DoD employees going to use touchscreen computers? If not, the Metro interface will just get in their way, and they'll need some retraining, too. If anything they should've gone with Windows 7. I think it's supported at least until 2020 (and if Windows 8/9 doesn't catch off, probably longer).

Also, the deal makes it to about $2,000 per user per 3 years. Isn't that...expensive? How much would the taxpayers have saved if they had gone Linux?

Apparently, 617 million dollars.

I agree with your point about Metro. $617m probably includes a support contract, Windows Server, and MS SharePoint Enterprise licenses.

Unfortunately there's no support organization big enough to implement Linux in the dod. I would think that only Microsoft has the experience to support such customers with endless use cases.

IBM? 400k employees and they kinda know their *nix.

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