MS Won't Release Study Disputing Munich's Linux-Switch Savings 268
itwbennett writes "As previously reported on Slashdot, in November of last year, the city of Munich reported savings of over €10 million from its switch to Linux. Microsoft subsequently commissioned a study (conducted by HP) that found that, in fact, 'Munich would have saved €43.7 million if it had stuck with Microsoft.' Now, Microsoft has said it won't release the study, saying that '[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'"
show us (Score:5, Interesting)
Show us your cards, it doesn't matter now Mr. Ballmer.
Re:show us (Score:5, Funny)
MSFT's internal study predicted that Munich would have saved so much because everyone would have been too busy dancing with their tablets to perform any governance or spend any money.
Dieter sprake (Score:5, Funny)
"Now is the time on Surface when we dance!"
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Would you like to touch my Ballmer?
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There is a study, conducted by HP, but they won't even show the Munich team what's in it...
After reading Focus' report, Karl-Heinz Schneider, head of the Munich's municipal IT, immediately asked Microsoft to provide him with the study, however, Microsoft also refused to send it to him
Maybe the savings were based on the opportunity to buy from MS before their massive price hikes?
Citing momentum, Microsoft plans 400% price increase for Windows 8
Today Microsoft announced the suggested final pricing for its Windows 8 operating system: $199.99 for an upgrade Windows 8 Pro. Currently, you can move to Windows 8 Pro for $39.99. Thus, Microsoft plans a 500% increase in the price of the upgrade, starting on February first.
Microsoft is proud of how its operating system has performed thus far, at least publicly: “[w]e are seeing good momentum with Windows 8 today,” the company stated in its blog post announcing the pricing changes.
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/18/citing-momentum-microsoft-plans-500-price-increase-for-windows-8/ [thenextweb.com]
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Show us your cards, it doesn't matter now Mr. Ballmer.
What, and show you all the spots they've put on them? That kind of ink isn't cheap, you know!
Actually, it DOES matter (Score:5, Interesting)
As such, it is a certainty that this 'study' is more of the same and would be shown to be so. That would be very difficult for MS's sales ppl to counter.
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That doesn't make it right that they can go around spouting marketing facts.
FTFY. ;-)
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Consider the logic. The original study showed a saving in switching from windows and office to linux and open source software, rather than sticking with windows and office. Now M$ have an alternate study which shows they would have saved four time as much in switching from windows and office to 'er' windows and office rather than 'er', sticking with windows and office. Hey, wait up a second, something here doesn't make any sense at all.
Re:Actually, it DOES matter (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand going after him for the apostrophe, but indenting paragraphs. Who the hell indents paragraphs on the web, an english teacher with a grudge?
Or those of us trying to make "mobile" web pages. ;-)
With such limited screen space, it's just reasonable to treat a blank-line separator as wasting an entire line of usable screen space. Using CSS to indent paragraphs lets you use that blank line for information, wasting only the 2- or 3-em indentation.
Of course, we are still plagued with web "designers" in the mobile arena, and they'll as usual maximize the blank space for (a)esthetic reasons. It's an ongoing battle that will never end, unless we can find a way to eject information minimizers from the web. But there are enough users out there who prefer shiny to information that this will probably never happen.
Re:show us (Score:5, Funny)
Munich: The first 6 digits of PI are 3.14159
MS: No, it's 123456. Honest, we've done a study and all.
Munich: Oh, great, can you show us?
MS: No, it's for internal purposes only. But trust us, it's 123456 allright.
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Obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
'[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'
Which of course is why they publicly claimed the 43.7M Euro figure.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Funny)
Switch from Microsoft to Microsoft and save $43.7 million?
I can understand "switch from stupid choice of products to better choices of products" though. And I don't find it unlikely that they had a lot of stupid choices there.
Another interesting option is if the switch to Linux saves money and then switching to Microsoft saves even more and then you can just continue switching, imagine the savings! Personally I have a hard time imagine you save money by switching back and forth though =P
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It was a proposed switch from Sharepoint running on Windows Server to Sharepoint running on Sharepoint.
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just like insurance companies... now they pay me!? :)
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
The 43.7 million is probably in short-term costs, i.e. the cost of switching over to Linux (retraining, deployment, etc.). The 10 million is probably the cost in long-term savings, i.e. the cost of Microsoft licenses and hardware upgrades after ~4-5 years.
What HP's study probably take into account is that the deployment of new boxes would've had to happen anyway, irrespective of whether it was new Windows boxes or new Linux boxes.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Micro-Soft doesn't want the public picking apart the flawed assumptions and conclusions of their 'study'.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Funny)
That's how much they would have saved in discounts. It would have cost them a hell of a lot more, but the savings were there.
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
'[it] was commissioned by Microsoft to HP Consulting for internal purposes only.'
Which of course is why they publicly claimed the 43.7M Euro figure.
Which brings up a sort of interesting point.... The EU has some rather strict laws regarding the "truthiness" of advertising. Does the public claim of massive savings equate to an advertisement for Microsoft? And if so, shouldn't the report be required to be publicly released to support such an advertisement? (Even if the methods and subsequent conclusions are ridiculed.)
What did you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone ever release a bullshit FUD report?
If they release it someone could criticize it, if not they can keep making claims you can't refute.
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would anyone ever release a bullshit FUD report?
If they release it someone could criticize it, if not they can keep making claims you can't refute.
Meanwhile, reports from the 1950's showed certain cigarettes didn't cause significant throat irritation. In other studies doctors recommended certain brands of cigarettes.
I guess it's just a matter of finding the right people to .. uh .. doctor your results.
Re:Obligatory Jack in the Box advertisement (Score:2)
This is one of their best, and related to the topic at hand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRO9Uwm1tes [youtube.com]
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This just in - bacon prevents hair loss!
Man, I love those Jack in the Box ads.
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly their point. It's all about protecting the FUD at this point.
Normally, MS releases reports about running MS being cheaper because of Admin costs being lower. They never mention the requirement for running Anti-virus/Anti-Malware, and in fact most of their studies never even show their own licensing fees. Usually they include the client license fees for connecting to servers, but tend to forget the much higher priced licenses on workstations.
MS office is cheaper than Libre office because of.. what exactly? The rate for re-writing macros is more expensive than a few hundred dollars (depending on your license deal) per user running MS products every year forever according to their logic. And yes, according to their logic you will be rewriting macros forever too!
Logic does not fit in their reports, which is why they continually spend more money on advertising and fake reports than they do on product development. They hide behind 3rd party companies paid to give benchmark results favoring their products.
The reason they still do as much business as they do is fitting with today's business logic. People get huge discounts and kickbacks to keep running MS products. If a shop moved to Linux, they would not receive the same kickbacks and discounts. Even if the overall cost is way more, you can't show bullshit savings to stock holders without those.
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ass covering.
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....and here I thought I was the only one who ever said "Snikeys!". ;)
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That is what you get from corporate CYA.
On the other hand you get shops like mine where CENTOS is the standard.
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MS office is cheaper than Libre office because of.. what exactly? The rate for re-writing macros is more expensive than a few hundred dollars (depending on your license deal) per user running MS products every year forever according to their logic. And yes, according to their logic you will be rewriting macros forever too!
I'd assume the logic is more to do with retraining costs for every head that uses MS Office. Libre/OpenOffice may look very similar to a 10 year old version of MS Office, but office uses like their familiarity and learned shortcuts - even if there is a quicker or easier way of doing something.
And that's before you consider the retraining costs for all new starters, who will more than likely be familiar with MS Office. And the retraining costs for your tech support who will have to support users through a p
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Our company uses MS office. I am a good programmer and a fairly competent computer user. I absolutely hate MS office. The other day I could not delete an embedded picture without deleting the one right below it, even though they were independently selectable. How irritating.
I am not saying libre office is better. I am saying it can't be much worse.
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Is all that really worth it to save a few hundred bucks per seat?
Depends - you;re counting immediate costs, not long-term.
When you consider the amount of retraining needed for each new version of MS Office to come out the pipe nowadays (starting with the stupid ribbon and going downhill from there), even with folks who are already mega-power-users on the thing? When you consider the never-ending EA agreement cycle (and that's the cheap way to do it when we talk these numbers)? When you consider that it takes fewer sysadmins to produce/maintain higher numbers of Linux ser
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Back when I was writing MS Excel and MS Access macros I did seem to be writing macros forever because the syntax kept changing a lot with each new version so in some cases nearly every single line had to be changed. To get an idea of how drastic - they both had their own things, then started using VB, which started off as BASIC, morphed into something like PASCAL and now VB is pretty much a low rent ripoff of java.
Re:What did you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why would anyone ever release a bullshit FUD report?
If they release it someone could criticize it, if not they can keep making claims you can't refute.
I can actually answer this. I am not going to go into details, but I have some inside knowledge. Sometimes these kinds of things are done simply to suck up to Microsoft and try to get more business from them. Of course you are asking why would Microsoft release such a report, which is a different question.
Pricing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pricing... (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean made up pricing?
They could easily release enough to quiet the masses and not give away that level of detail.
If they are cutting Munich a one time special deal that would be even more they don't want to release. Save $40 million now! Pay $80 million next year.
Re:Pricing... (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean made up pricing?
I presume the "special" pricing you get if you're a large organisation and say to MS, "we're going to switch to linux to save money and then talk to the press about it"
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More like, special pricing you get when you are trying to produce a report that is supposed to show how cheap it is to keep using Microsoft software.
Microsoft can just quote arbitrary numbers and claim that someone, somewhere, could get them if they didn't use something else.
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I think it means "last ditch effort to save a customer" pricing
Re:Pricing... (Score:5, Insightful)
>"If they are cutting Munich a one time special deal that would be even more they don't want to release. Save $40 million now! Pay $80 million next year."
And if the Linux option didn't exist, no such super-special pricing would be available in the first place.
So even if they didn't switch to Linux, Linux *STILL* saved them millions of dollars....
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Of course, guaranteed. Why? I'd bet you an infinite amount of money that it in some way completely skips the training costs and licensing costs of windows vs linux's nearly instant transition.
Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not surprised.
Of course, there's nothing preventing the company from using commercially-supported distributions (like Red Hat) on critical systems if they really need the support and clones (like CentOS) on other systems.
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Here's the thing: If you really have such a small organization that one person is all you need to run everything... then you're better off contracting an outside company to run it. Yes, it'll cost more than the one guy would - but you can't really get by with just one guy, because of sick days, vacations, etc. Even if you only have enough work to keep one person busy, you're going to wind up hiring two or three if you need high reliability.
The consulting company will be more expensive than one guy, but
Re:Linux claimed to be cheaper than Windows (Score:5, Funny)
There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.
Personally, I consider myself quite charming.
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There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.
Personally, I consider myself quite charming.
I suppose it all depends on the spin you put on things.
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There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.
Personally, I consider myself quite charming.
Have you considered commissioning a study to support that?
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> Here's the thing: If you really have such a small organization that one person is all you need to run everything... then you're better off contracting an outside company to run it.
Then you've just trusted your family jewels to someone who isn't really a part of your team. They work for someone else. They have their own boss. They have their own agenda. They will try to "manage your expectations".
You're better off paying 2 of your own guys and have them twiddling their thumbs.
Outsourcing? Really? You mu
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as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies" (Score:5, Insightful)
That part alone is probably not nonsense. Linux engineers probably are more expensive.
On the other hand, I would expect you to need to hire fewer Linux engineers, and for the ones you got to be generally better quality and get more work done than the average MCSE.
Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies" (Score:5, Interesting)
Competent engineers are more expensive...
Incompetent windows engineers are ten a penny, incompetent engineers generally don't even know what linux is so won't claim to know it.
Competent windows engineers are no cheaper than competent linux engineers.
Re:as with all paid-for-by-microsoft "studies" (Score:4, Insightful)
Has anyone actually seen a TCO study where the T could actually mean "Total"?
They can't release the study, (Score:5, Insightful)
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My guess is that it has some information about how they could've saved money through other means (eg, not buying licenses for software for people who don't need it, etc.) ... which if other groups actually did, would cut into their profits.
plausable deniability (Score:3)
Although it won't stand up to scrunity by the outside world it doesn't have to. It will keep the faithful, faithful
Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
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It'll be 2015, because of Windows 8 and the Surface tablets.. The OEMs will need time to renegotiate their Windows distribution licenses, then find distros to partner with.
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
With trackpads only. (Score:2)
I have an excerpt from the report's abstract:
"For the purpose of this study, Microsoft assumes Munich will be installing Fedora 18..."
In Other News (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In Other News (Score:5, Funny)
I ran my own study to test your claims, and I'm afraid your conclusions appear wrong.
They're only 83% full.
Liars! (Score:3)
At the best the study is not fake. HP just fooled MS around and they don't want everyone to know.
At the worse, the claims by MS are false, the study is fake and they just got uncovered!
The MS study by HP (Score:5, Funny)
Went something like this:
Dear Bill/Steve,
We have spent 6 months evaluating Linux in the Munich offices and have found the following issues:
1) IE is not installed so many of compatibility webpages you wanted us to evaluate did not work correctly.
2) The accounts which were created in Active Directory to allow for LDAP logins in Linux have a schema different from the documentation you provided and did not work correctly.
3) The Excel spreadsheets saved in the Open Document Format were not compatible with LibreOffice's Open Document Format and did not display all sheets corrrecly. Apparently the format is different than what was specificed in the standard you provided.
4) The Macro virus attached to the Excel spreadsheet *did* execute correctly and damaged one of the exported NTFS filesystems on the SAMBA server.
In closing, for the 6 months of screwing around trying to get your proprietary solutions to play nicely via the advertised specifications we've found none of them worked as advertised (except for fore-mentioned virus) and are billing you €40.7 million for our lead times and €3.7 million to cover anger management therapy for our support personnel.
Yours truly,
Meg W.
Newsflash (Score:5, Funny)
Newsflash: sponsored study shows results that favor sponsor. Truly shocking.
Wait a minute (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article
Operating the Microsoft software (not including licensing fees) would cost [EUR]17 million, while the alternative will amount to almost [EUR]61 million
(emphasis mine)
Of course if you exclude the cost of buying (sorry- licensing) the software it is cheaper!
well.. (Score:4, Informative)
they tried to advertise Windows and .NET with one of their "studies" years ago when the London Stock Exchange started using their products for it's trading system and they even made a nice video about it:
Get the Facts: The London Stock Exchange
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSM55bsCrM [youtube.com]
but it looks like it didn't turn out that well..
London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform [computerworld.com]
London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux
http://www.linuxtoday.com/high_performance/2009100702835NWDPSV [linuxtoday.com]
The London Stock Exchange moves to Novell Linux
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-london-stock-exchange-moves-to-novell-linux/8285 [zdnet.com]
maybe they learned their lesson now
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You forgot to link to the stories about the catastrophic failures and day long outages the london stock exchange suffered while they were running a windows based system...
Internal purposes only? (Score:5, Funny)
So were they just trying to make themselves feel better?
How would you spin that if you were MS marketing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Vreenak said it best (Score:4, Funny)
Romulan Senator Vreenak [memory-alpha.org] said it best:
It's a faaaaake!
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Microsoft Tortures Puppies! (Score:2)
I commissioned a study which proves that Microsoft beats 200 puppies with a spiked club every Tuesday and Friday.
Sorry, I cannot show the study; it's for internal use only. You just have to take my word for it.
Study proposes staying with XP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Please tell me, oh wise ones in Microsoft and HP how Munich could stay with XP, given that it is rapidly reaching EOL and support for newer hardware is likely to be problematic?
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Where the savings would've been... (Score:2)
The savings probably would've come from not having Microsoft billing them for the $43 million it cost to hire HP to do the study...
What a PR mess...what did Microsoft do? (Score:2)
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What does Microsoft do? "Promote" people who design clunkers like Windows Millennium and Vista into their PR department?
Design? Design, you say? It's clear that all versions of Windows with funny names were "designed" by Marketing, not Engineering. That is, the people who were in control of the release, were not the people who should have been in control of the release.
The two divisions in any company will have radically different interpretations of the word "Quality". If you talk to a Marketeer, "Quality" means "cleverly named feature set". If you talk to an Engineer, "Quality" means that things work as intended.
Think
Speechless (Score:2)
Not a Microsoft bashing comment... (Score:2)
Figures never lie... (Score:3)
Night is day and day is night (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft full well knows that at this point the whole Microsoft vs Linux you must appeal to the faithful of their religion who will studiously ignore the ravings of the pagans and will hang on to every word coming from Mt. Olympus in Seattle. So microsoft doesn't need to publish this study. Its mere existence is enough for the embedded (and often well microsoft certified) IT staff in any organization to counter the 10 Million dollar savings. This 43 million savings not only is much better but will work well when a meta study is done and totals up the averages. So even if 3 other studies confirm the 10 million in Linux savings the average will still accrue to Microsoft.
Personally my experience is that Linux can be a great replacement for most but not all day to day systems. With most corporate software solutions going web it really doesn't matter which platform you are browsing from. Most employees of large organizations are shockingly unsophisticated users of the software so will rarely even notice the difference. Where you often run into problems are when legacy windows based software must be installed on many systems such as some kind of timesheet software. But a linux switch often works well as long as you let those who need Windows continue to use windows (say the accountants because they are extreme power users of Excel.) But there are other huge savings to be had by tossing Microsoft. In an all open source system licensing is really really easy. Then there is the fact that Linux can be so undemanding on the desktops that you can cut way back on system upgrades.
But there can be weird costs such as printer X that might not play well with Linux. That can offset some of the lesser hardware savings. You can be suddenly restricted to not being able to deploy certain windows only solutions.
The key to succeeding that I have seen is to start small. You take a small typical department and start switching the machines over to Linux and see what happens.
The key to failure is to let a small group of senior IT people with Microsoft certifications up the wazoo bring in MS sales people to help them thwart the effort. You can tell when this is happening when suddenly random senior management start protesting the potential switch to Linux armed with bundles of studies proving that the organization will be cursed with locusts if so much as one machine is converted to Linux. These will be people who were asking for an Apple laptop the week before.
Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data (Score:2)
We all know that every time a nation or large company threatens to go open source, Microsoft sends its army of sales people with large expense budgets to offer 'better deals' to persuade them against moving away. These types of deals, of course mean better pricing and/or other terms along with lots of wining, dining, bonuses, gifts and kickbacks. It is quite likely their study includes these deep discounts which everyone would demand if this type of information was made available.
I know that in general, c
Re:Likely they don't want to reveal pricing data (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft has doubled the cost of Windows in one fell swoop with their dirty pricing tactics. Volume licensing was a pretty popular was for large companies to save money where they would buy all the licenses for Windows and have their PCs sent to them empty or with a preload image sent to the OEM by the company. But one year, Microsoft decided that every volume licensed version of Desktop Windows is "an upgrade" and so requires a retail version, OEM version or Mac OS X installed prior to installing the volume licensed version. So you have to pay for Windows twice to use it once. Their sales numbers went through the roof that year and lawyers out there didn't blink an eye.
There is no way they are "competing" with open source. The reality is they have acheived critical mass and have been milking and maintaining it ever since. But lately things have been eroding their critical mass as alternatives have grown increasingly more compatible and usable. It's a secret they would rather not have larger IT shops learn about. IT people are trying to keep their jobs and if they can save the company their cost in salary or more by moving to open source they will do it. They just have to know it's safe and "accepotable" to do so. And lots of things are enabling this to come true. Among these are the increase in web-based enterprise applications really helping this migration along.
Of course not (Score:2)
They have no desire to show the world just how severely you must torture logic and how much fudge you have to use to make FOSS look more expensive than MS.
"It's totally real and legit." (Score:3)
- Manti Te'o, Microsoft Spokesman
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And the OS is just the tip of the iceberg.
The project is creating a common IT infrastructure, with client administration, helpdesk ticketing, centralized solutions instead of every department doing its own thing, ...
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Sounds like RIAA math to me. Except you left out the part where Microsoft lost out $800 trillion in potential future sales to every man, woman, child, dog, cat, rock and prokaryote that has ever throught of Munich
Re:Key to success is doing it right (Score:4, Informative)
Stick to printers that actually support Postscript... There is no reason to ever buy a printer that doesn't support postscript...
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And how much TIME recertifying every app at was just fine with postscript? Or even real PCL will do. Every time somebody has to touch the printer you lose TWICE. Once for the employee not working and once for a tech to come fiddle with it. Do that 2-3 times in the life of a printer and you blow $500 easily.
The REAL problem is most companies have nothing they WANT from IT. They are not actively advancing their use of IT to save money. They don't see that $500 as "lost" because that IT person could have been
Re:conducted by HP (Score:5, Interesting)
On that note... one place I worked tried hiring HP a couple of times to conduct studies and make recommendations for our network and systems. They tried that because they'd had a long relationship with DEC, and this was shortly after HP bought Compaq (who had bought DEC before that), and they were expecting the work done to be of the quality they'd gotten from DEC consultants in the past.
They supposedly spent weeks doing the study and writing up the reports... and when they came in, they were obviously generic company boilerplate that someone had edited, including many missed instances of things like COMPANY NAME. And - surprise! - all their recommendations were for HP products and services, with the only comparisons being to companies well known for being expensive. For extra fun, a good part of the body of the report was taken from a white paper that had been produced by a group at some university - they'd accidentally left in some of the text identifying the authors and where they were in the first version they gave to us.
We never hired HP to do a study for us again after that. As I recall, my boss also refused to pay them for giving us a report that we could have gotten ourselves from a Google search. Not sure what happened in the end with payment, but their local people, who were former DEC people, were deeply embarrassed.
Re:This story (Score:4, Interesting)
Who are you kidding? I don't care if Microsoft releases source code for anything, that's their thing. I don't want .NET, Office, or DirectX on Linux.