There is definitely a "certain degree" of lock-in, but it's like being trapped in a prison with a key-making machine and full details on every lock in the place. Sure, it'll take a bit of time and effort, but you can get out pretty simply.

I worked for Vic Roads [vic.gov.au] all the way through their experiment with OS/2. They back end was AIX and department level servers were OS/2 as were the workstations. The rumour going around was that IBM had spent a lot of money making a few senior managers in that organisation very happy to get that deal through. Around about the time I left staff were pushing for Windows98 to be deployed in place of OS/2. I came back to do some contracting and people were betting on how many hours it would run without crashing.

To get anything different in I think you have to have a lot of money behind it. I can see the same thing going on where I work but the product being pushed is clear case.

I'm curious. Who do you get for support for Microsoft products. Does Microsoft offer support? And by support I mean, if there is a bug in Word corrupting your mission critical documents, will they promise to fix it? And will they give you a projected time for completion on the work. And will they give you periodic updates? And will they send you a patched version as soon as it is fixed? How much does that kind of support cost? Are you sure it's really cheaper than an open source project?

And what happens when Microsoft "End-Of-Life"s a product? Can you get support from a third party? Can you develop internal resources to provide support and add small features? Or do you have to simply buy whatever Microsoft replacing it with, regardless of whether or not it fits your needs?

And when you say that finding people able to do internal support (I assume first level support, since you can't really do anything else with proprietary software) is easier and cheaper with more popular software, isn't this simply a training issue? Do you really have such a high turnover rate in your company that most of them were trained in using software at their previous job? Or are most of them trained at your company, meaning that it doesn't matter if it's the most popular software or not -- It just matters that you can find initial training at a reasonable cost?

Certainly I think it's a good idea to get support for software you buy. However, I have never worked at a proprietary company that offered anything resembling what I think of as support. "Support" in the industry means get the off the phone as quickly as possible because every minute on the phone eats your entire profit. Sure we did special one-off deals for customers who bought 10,000 copies of our software, but we gave them a bloody hard time of it. If they didn't threaten to not upgrade to the next version, they wouldn't get anything at all. We might fix their bug in the next service pack, or maybe not, at the whim of the program manager.

Real support, meaning having someone who is contractually obliged to help you when your software doesn't work for you only seems to be available for custom built software. And if you aren't getting source with your custom built software, you're getting ripped off.

Or at least that's been my experience. It would be interesting to see how your experience differs.

Microsoft isn't the ONLY choice when it comes to vendors. Microsoft is just a supplier of OS (and a few applications). For mission critical stuff, most companies use stuff that's a LOT more expensive than what microsoft charges. And frankly, yes, when I have a business critical error in an MS product, I WILL get it fixed, one way or another, that's what I do for a living, and I'm good at my job. But when all else is said and done, show me another OS that'll run for instance a SAP gui, Toad, Quest Space Manager, Business Objects, Dimension and Oracle, has decent text editing, integrated network support, spreadsheet and is intuitive. Show me, and I'll happily try to convice my customers to choose that platform. But thing is, MS being the single OS that EVERYONE supports, you're pretty much locked in on that platform because of your application needs.

That doesn't mean I can't choose MySQL over Oracle (if my applications support it) and similar. It doesn't mean my server side HAS to be MS if I can do it with something else. However, if I do choose the OSS product, I still have to get my business critical support from someone who will charge a bundle.

And when all else is said and done. It's all about my business. Software should adapt to my business, my business shouldn't have to adapt to the software. So IF I choose a software that can do what I want, that'll be a lot easier (and cheaper) for me to live with, than with software that needs millions of dollars in development before it can do what I need it to. And that's just the initial business costs, think about the TCO and added support costs aswell, the investment in knowledge and manpower etc. and you may understand why so many businesses are choosing the "easier road".

In essence it's the inhouse vs outsource debate in a nutshell. With inhouse, you have total control, but also total responsibility and have to carry the total cost. With outsource, you put everything into the hands of someone else, and they provide you with a service (hopefully) equal to what you pay for it, and that payment is pretty much transparent for a number of years.

Sorry in advance for what will be perceived as pro-microsoft, but here goes:

Support for OTS software, or hardware, or anything standard for that matter is very different to support for customised or specialised tools. Microsoft will not likely care that you have found a bug affecting your mission critical documents. However, I've yet to see a bug in off the shelf software that does affect mission critical documents. Not saying it'll never happen, but lets face it, most bugs are security, GUI, or minor. Wait a little before jumping to the new version, or better still wait till need has outgrown the functionality. I've seen companies running office 97 till just last year. Because it worked.

End of life ain't that bad. Most Microsoft tools have 10yrs +, and it's not like they suddenly stop working. Just accept that there won't be any support, patches or whatever. But hey, when was the last time you patched Word for one of those mission critical bugs? If you haven't found them in the 10 years, chances are it'll keep working. (ok, if Microsoft had their way, they would... but that's another issue). Custom software will lock you in more than vendors will. Maybe a generalisation, but for now, you don't like Word, change to Open Office. Yes, there's a cost, just like there is a cost for changing from Word 2003 to 2007. But when talking about enterprise systems or niche tools, it's a lot worse - you can end up changing software, vendors and business processes. All of that costs money.

I dare say that you need a lot less support buying off the shelf from a locked in vendor than going open source (you know, cause it's cool, suits your religion or seems cheaper up front).

What annoys me more is when companies don't like the off the shelf stuff and pay to hack it and redesign it - creating the worst of both worlds.

I would like to see open source used more, but it won't save taxpayers money.
If the government has a billion pounds in tax money and spends £500 million on Microsoft Office and £500 million on limos, coke, whores and personal swiss bank accounts, what will happen if they ditch MS Office and get free software?

a) They reduce tax by £500 million.
b) They reduce tax by more than £500 million by also paying back the money they embezzled.
c) They spend £1 billion on limos, coke, whores and personal swiss bank accounts.

While document handling, such as the replacement of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word dependent operations, benefit massively from the switch to standards compliant software, I'm afraid that CAD isn't there yet. Try designing circuitry or hardware with open source software and you'll see what I mean. Tools like AutoCAD for your metal work and the circuit libraries for PowerPCB just aren't avaialble in the open source equivalents.

For Active Directory, though, that monster should have been replaced by Bind and Kerberos and LDAP years ago.

It's worth noting that the economies are slightly different if you are a government. By nature, a government is a monopoly and benefits directly (in terms of tax revenue) from increases in the local economy. If software doesn't do what the government needs, they hire local programmers. This means that the money is staying in the local economy, rather than going abroad, and so they get more tax money: They'll get some percentage back immediately in income tax, while they'll get nothing back from foreign purchases. Then they'll get more back from sales tax, and so on, as the local programmers buy things. If they then release their changes, then that means that the software is now better and will benefit companies. Some of them will then be able to use it unmodified, and spend money on other things, rather than send it to a foreign corporation.

Overall, spending $1m on Microsoft software might, for a government, be a worse decision than spending $2m on hippyware.

Exactly!

So switching your office from Windows XP to Windows 7 and switching the Servers from Server 2003 to Server 2010 would actually have MORE of a cost than switching to OSS alternatives as the costs you talk about are exacerbated by the fact that you have to buy all new software licenses from microsoft, bot all new Apps as well AND new hardware.

I just saw a client do this, their upgrade from XP and 2003 to current cost them a whole lot more than expected. Drivers for Windows 7 did not exist for a lot of the older hardware that was chugging along on XP, so that hardware had to be thrown away and replaced with new.

Then the final insult, they did all this and discovered their upgrade to Exchange 2010 caused their room scheduling system that interfaces to the touchpanels at each conference room to break.

OOPS! that scheduler they relied on now does not work, they tape printouts on the doors until the vendor certifies their plugin with microsoft.

ALL switching has costs, Microsoft upgrades cost as much as Switching to OSS lately and it will only get worse.

Similar scenario.

I'm interning at a 25 person non-profit. They were putting thousands into Exchange. I did 4 things:

1. Switched them over to Google Apps for free. Saved them loads of money, and they all love having the ease of access. To the exchange admin below, suck it. Seriously, that one outage was nowhere near as bad as the spam problems and other hassles an offsite exchange server created.

2. Got the people who "just couldn't" use gmail's web interface copies of Outlook 2007 through techsoup. Which, after 3 months of switching, was only the secretary and the president.

3. Switched our 5-computer lab for visitors and program members over to linuxmint. It needs no configuration, let alone administration, and its better than the prior windows 2000 by far.

4. Set up Hamachi for remote file access, because nobody used the VPN anyways (cause "my home computer is so slow and full of WeatherBug!").

5. Set up an open source phone server. It was a PITA, but it was WAY better than renting terrible equipment from the phone company.

3. Switched our 5-computer lab for visitors and program members over to linuxmint. It needs no configuration, let alone administration, and its better than the prior windows 2000 by far.

Interesting. We switched out most of our office workstations to Ubuntu with OpenOffice (customer support, help desk, development, and most of the admin seats). Kept one token XP box in the conference room to support those GoToMeeting things, very few of which support Linux. Accounting needed a Windows kiosk for some Windows-only software and outside sales staff wanted to keep their Windows laptops. The one graphics/marketing gal had a Mac. We had few problems with user acceptance, though there was some training involved transitioning from Office to OpenOffice. That was the most difficult part of the whole change.

There were two old Win 2K servers we replaced with CentOS and we scrapped the 2008 servers and SQL server. We rented space on an outsource Windows host to support legacy applications and switched development from .NYET to PHP. We let go two .NET developers and replaced them with one really amazing PHP developer and the entry level developer we hired to replace the Exchange admin. We not only saved the salaries, but the cost of the workstations and VisualStudio.

Be interesting to get more detail on the phone server. Our local provider actually had a pretty good system and the price was right. Google Apps was very popular.