The Microsoft products are probably mostly being used by admin staff rather than Nobel Prize winners at CERN. They probably have the canteen menu typed up in Wo

The Microsoft products are probably mostly being used by admin staff rather than Nobel Prize winners at CERN. They probably have the canteen menu typed up in Word and the receptionists using Microsoft Outlook. Then in the visitor centre some automated Powerpoint presentations for passing five year olds to learn about the atom. The point of an educational discount is that it is for the core educational stuff. I doubt that they are running Microsoft Access on any of those supercomputers and I doubt that 49 Petabytes of data goes onto NTFS formatted storage. They probably got sold an enterprise educational deal decades ago when Microsoft were trying to indoctrinate all students to learn their products. I mean, why use LaTeX when you can do it in half the time in Word? It was good at the time. CERN were well placed to do everything with the WWW and have a culture of it, to be doing things the Chromebook way where you don't have desktop software any more. Maybe Microsoft have given the kick they need and maybe peripheral admin things should be paying for Microsoft software since these subsidiary operations are not hardcore research.